Redbone

by Mahogany L. Browne

What I may love most about Redbone is the way it strains formally, with syntax and diction, with voice and perspective, searching for the right space on the page to make of this complex family story which, like most family stories, is made of sweetness and plain old hurt a kind of bearable song. It's such a moving act. Such a caring and true telling. Such a singing. --Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2015

Reviews

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I go back to this book often. Mahogany L. Browne slays the page yet again.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A substantive collection. Strong women, love, pain, family, and the song getting sung a little different on down the years. There were times, a few poems, I felt shut out, but each word sits true on the tongue, and I don't know if we can ask much more from poetry.

3.5/5

[jawno okhiulu · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I picked up this book, I knew I was in for a razing, but I didn't know HOW bad it would be. I'll tell you what, this book razed me good. Mahogany L. Browne is able to patch a quilt of love and learning out of the hurricane of two bodies set to clash. If marriage must be a boxing match – as I experienced in my childhood and as Browne describes via Redbone – it ain't often a fair fight. What, then, do we say to ourselves in the loud quiet of the graveyard love? Browne unravels that defiance, that perseverance in Redbone, and paints her in all her imperfect glory as no ordinary caged bird. Browne shatters the mirrors of relationship violence and the inheritance of trauma, laying it all to bare in honest love that leaves so much warm nectar to be collected from the remains. This book of poems is for real compassionate courage; To write these truths, these feelings, these violations on a page, to love them with poetry. The healing on the pages stretches like a red setting sun across an evening horizon for me, your work helped me to lay a lot of my own grief to rest.

"I am her greatest weapon"

Thank you, Mahogany!

[Asher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book pierces. So glad I read it

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Browne's verse is ambitious, intense, musical, and dramatic (in the best possible senses). Redbone tells the story of a Black woman (implied to be Browne's mother). She is a force but not immune to pain, beautiful and theatrical and her tumultuous relationship to Bam is believable and honest without romanticizing the tumult itself. Browne experiments with a wide variety of forms using spacing and the page to produce powerful emotional resonances and rhythms as in "The Cycle" and "Bam Behind Bars After Beating a Man with a Baseball Bat" and "This".

My favorite poem is probably "This" which closes the collection with a beautiful fullness and theatricality, capping off the effect of the collection as shot through with orality and narration and the rhythms of speech in a form that is impossible without the assistance of the written page as it makes brilliant use of spacing and line breaks in its visual functioning. Other favorite pieces include "My Mother, Redbone," "What We Lost in the Fire," "Redbone and the Rabbit Fur Coat," and "Muddy Waters." Highly recommended (especially right now and moving forward as people are working to better incorporate Black literature into their regular reading).