Boy with Thorn

by Rickey Laurentiis

Winner of the 2016 Levis Reading Prize
Winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Rickey Luarentiis is a winner of a 2018 Whiting Writers Prize

In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself—confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Nonfiction, Race, Queer, African American, Gay

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 2015

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

"For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.
Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct
alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out
a need to know. You only feel you need to live.
That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest
fills with a strange new air, you will not ask
what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,
but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb
that keeps it kicking. Let it."

-You Are Not Christ
by Rickey Laurentiis

[Max Urai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished this haunting book of poetry and while I feel it's almost too fragile to analyse right now, do know that it absolutely kicked my ass and that I'm wildly jealous of it's author. Actually, "fragile" is not the right word, that implies something that breaks easily, and these poems, if anything, are about undergoing pain, if not outright survival, both literal and spiritual. I kind of want to use the word "precious", but without the implied eye-roll (it's precious) or the connotation of it being twee. It's more like a piece of forest you don't want other people to find out about. Or that's the place it created inside me, at least.

[BookishStitcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I'm just finding more and more often that I can relate more to the emotions and experiences of female poets. That is where I often find the poems that really pull out big 5 star emotional responses from me. I do think though that it's really important to read voices and experiences of people different than I am. I definitely enjoyed this poetry collection and learned more about someone's personal experiences.

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 2 out of 5]

Loose

This is a collection very conscious of its author's identity as a gay black man. What frustrated was that for all that consciousness, it proved remarkably unfocused. Not once did I find that pithy, damaging couplet that rearranged my world. Rather, there was a lot of mannered rambling one could not help but feel needed a good editor to bring it to the next level. I was a little disappointed. I sensed talent, but it was largely undone by being published before the final tight read was done.

[Cait Hutsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful collection that merits a second, or third reading. Complex and layered and very outside my experience.

[Dennis Bensie · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this collection, I feel like I know the poet. We may not have much in common, but I understand his twists and his deeply felt Southern-(gay)-gothic roots. He takes the reader on a journey that is historical and still very painful and relevant. Stunning poetry.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boy With Thorn is a haunting volume of elegiac, ekphrastic, allusive poems that address the violence brought upon the Black body. The voice and language remind me of Carl Phillips, Kevin Prufer, and Eric Pankey. It's good to see Glenn Ligon's artwork on the cover. The tone is quiet but unrelenting in its insistence on the subject of this violence in the following poems: Conditions for a Southern Gothic, Ghazal for Emmett Till, Vanitas With Negro Boy, Full, Southern Gothic, and the long poem, Of the Leaves That Have Fallen. I had to stop reading for a moment after Full, in which the speaker becomes one of the bodies enduring the brutality at the hand of another. It's a short poem, but it is haunting and ghastly. It begins presumably in the voice of one of the perpetrators kind of reporting what he and his posse have done to "six lit/bodies" and ends with the speaker shifting to the voice of one of the six victims. The last line cuts itself off and interjects "Dear lord" as if it's too gruesome to go on. I also had to take a breather after some of the numbered parts in Of the Leaves That Have Fallen, in which the speaker more or less forces himself to look through postcards picturing lynched Black people. The speaker asks why spectators "come to circle the hanging feet" at these public lynchings, and he questions his own looking. He references the myth of Osiris and Isis, which also fits nicely with the allusive inclination of the volume. Vanitas With Negro Boy is my favorite ekphrastic poem in the book. There's a triumph in this voice, which ends with a fantasy of violent revenge upon a master. This violence is what the master expects of his slave, and the language seems to imply the master's desire for it: "This is what/I'll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it." I also love the twist in this line: "Why trust the Old Masters? Old/Masters, never trust me."

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Laurentiis' poetry is just as breathtaking as hearing him recite it.
I met him more than a year ago, on a cold October evening during a literature festival. I had never heard of him before then nor had I read anything of him. And all of a sudden in walks this tall slender person, wearing a beautiful glittery mini dress, and stands in front of me. He begins reading out loud and instantly the whole room is quiet, filled with his warm low voice. Listening to him makes for a strange counterbalance: his words -his voice- reassure you and disturb you all the same. I sat there for what seemed like hours, just listening to this warm voice telling me of naked black bodies and blood and sweat and history. And then it was over.
I walked up to him afterwards, determined to get this book and have him sign it for me, to not forget this mystical evening. He was just as nice, calm and approachable.
This same copy of the book is what I read today, another cold evening (November this time). And everything came rushing back. The Boy with thorn walked once again and stood before me.

[Alexander Davidson · Rating 2 out of 5]

During my year of "read more poetry," I think it's safe to say that I just don't get it.

I enjoyed the poems that were clearly linked to other artistic pieces that I could look up and see to help appreciate the poetry more. However, when looking at the "Notes" section at the end, it was clear to me that you needed to be a poetry scholar (which I am not) to have picked up on all of the other references in this collection (which I did not) and appreciate them.

I can see how others would like it?

[David Grosskopf · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are written with the kind of woven allusions that contextualize, resonate, but also demand much from the reader. When I failed to put the pieces together, I was grateful for the Notes section at the end that provided some of that context, but could always rely on the power of feeling from Laurentiis' images and sonorous presence: even in ugliness of subject, there was beauty, delicacy throughout--"Emboldened and dipped in oil; like confessions / Whispered at the longest tables: these bones that build a canon" (51).

[Alicia (PrettyBrownEyeReader) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this collection from author, Brittany Cooper. She recommended this collection in a recent interview. The poet tells stories of the American South regarding lynching and violence against Black men. The prose are elegant and sometimes hard to digest the cruelty of the images painted with words.

The poet references other poets’ works in this collection. A notes section points the reader to the referenced works for exploration. This makes this collection an excellent way for readers to learn more about poetry.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rich and deep, reminds me strongly of Carl Phillips though more explicit about disturbing content. (Specifically lynching.) Another one to come back to repeatedly for study, pleasure in the language, form, and for my own inspiration.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

4-4.5

[Bekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this take on ekphrasis poetry.

[Katrina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent language.

[Greta · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty awful. One of those books that makes you scratch your head, even for poetry. You want to feel for the author and their identity but they end up coming across kind of pretentious.

[Mari Vic · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horrible book written by a horrible person

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The intersectionality showcased in this collection is vibrant. Accessibility points were far and few between for me as a reader but I could see this being a welcome recommendation in the future.

[Sanjay Varma · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very good poetry collection, that wanes a bit in the third and final section. All of these poems are about the black experience in America. The first two sections of “Boy With Thorn” describe a “southern gothic” world of lynchings, described in the most beautiful language, like nature poetry. Two poems about Emmett Till are perhaps the high point.

From “Ghazal for Emmett Till”:

Quiet now your tongue You’re in this cotton land
Oaks swing long limbs of men on this cotton land

From “Of The Leaves That Have Fallen”:

Who knows the story of the pilfered god,
Osiris, unloaded and dismembered—or how his wife
Combed her imagination for his several parts,
An act of revisionist history, an act of love?
I do. This is what the boy in me knows when he decides
To enter in these photos, slowly, as into a city of snow.

The poems seek to revivify past anxieties about Jim Crow, and then use that language to reveal anxiety about race in our current era, c. 2018. But for what purpose? Poetry can have different, and multiple, purposes. I interpreted “Boy With Thorn” to be an epic poem. Poems are epic if their story becomes central to a national or tribal identity. By singing the black community’s origin story and essential struggle, through these tales of lynchings and Jim Crow, Laurentiis' poems succeed in strengthening the identity of black Americans.

But, notably, Laurentiis is not a visionary poet. Percy Shelley once claimed in his essay "A Defense of Poetry" that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." When Laurentiis reminds us about lynchings and slavery, he evokes the past, but he does not try to imagine and describe a future, therefore his poetry stops short of being visionary. When Laurentiis writes poetry, it is a fundamentally different act compared to when Colin Kaepernick kneels during the national anthem, or when Alicia Garza tweets about police brutality.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book made me uncomfortable (which it was supposed to) at points, touched me at points...

And yet I felt a bit ambivalent about it in the end.

I did absolutely love the title poem.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 L383b 2015