St. Trigger

by Aaron Coleman

Aaron Coleman's St. Trigger, winner of the 2015 Button Poetry Prize, investigates race and gender in contemporary America through a constantly shifting series of structures, forming its own boundaries in one poem only to break and reshape them in the next. Narrative shatters into pure lyric and reforms in an instant. Coleman's poems define themselves — sharp and blazing and wholly new.

Genres: Poetry

52 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2016

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are challenging poems. They are dense and they don't give up their narratives easily.

Several of the poems have "saint" titles (St. Inside and Not, Sta. Soledad, St. Seduction, St. Trigger) and two of the poems, Rich and Through, take their form from A. Van Jordan's poem "From" {https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/from}, which is a dictionary entry of the various meanings of a particular word. A form of narrative develops in the poem, especially in Through, which seems to tell the story of ex-slaves, from being on the run to trying to find employment and weathering the years of relationship commitment, but time isn't neatly cataloged so you're not sure if it's more modern or rooted in post-Civil War America. This time-jumping occurs in St. Inside and Not as well to greater degree -- mentions of swamp-swallowed, Jelly Roll, and the despicable "punishment" in the Jim Crow South of a "runaway sharecropper" (and the curious, disgusting practice of sending postcards bearing photos of lynched Black people) seem to point to a certain time and place in history. However, "hands/held high above head, body blown open" seems to point to more recent times and the inordinate number of police shootings of unarmed Black Americans.

The opening poem, Viciousness in Ends, employs a really cool form (kind of a variation of a sestina) in which phrases and images repeat in the first and last stanzas, in the second and penultimate stanzas, and so forth until they meet each other in the middle; the middle stanza does not repeat elsewhere.

I had the pleasure of helping to choose "On Acquiescence" for publication in River Styx. This poem was arresting then and now. It is one of the more straightforward narratives in the volume, about a Black JV basketball team being bused in to play a white team, and the anger and frustration of youth and racial tension. [SIDE NOTE: I remember first reading "our black feathers rustled/like midnight peacocks claiming our cage" as "our black fathers ..." and felt an immense swell of pride and righteousness for these fathers defending their Black sons against the racism they were met with by this white school.]

Lastly, the title poem is intriguing. The poem is made up of sort of floating phrases in long lines with lots of tabbing, so that you have to turn the book sideways to read the horizontal page. Not sure what it would do to the poem to condense it in standard lines. The poem has plenty of words that sound and act like gunshots and their associated consequences: "soaked ... cloaked ... marked man ... ready finger ... aimed." Perhaps Coleman wanted to give the sense of scatter as opposed to contained sense.

EDITED TO ADD: Another commenter here included lines in her review from "Seed Beneath the Dark," which I can't believe I missed in my own reading. What a beautiful poem in which a seed seems to speak-- quiet but with an urgency that reminds me of Eric Pankey's "To Christ our Lord," which also uses the transformative nature of fire.

[caramels · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a big fan of poems that go wild on indentation and white space (and even so, this kind of poems were in the minority here), that's the only reason I'm giving 4 start to an otherwise perfect collection. The poems were absolutely beautiful, an on-the-verge-of-insanity kind of beautiful, which is the best kind. I mean look at this:

“I build hundreds of my own angels
and dare the cold to mold me daily into a bridge
between what I have forgotten and what I owe.”

Don't you just want to cry, pull out your hair, scream, perhaps not in that order?

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The difference between this shorter volume and the Four Way Books volume Threat Come Close would appear to be a substantial revision. And two years (though, given publishing schedules, it could be a week). About 25 poems. (We don't know what the background was to the submission of this chapbook.) So these poems were revised, and folded into Threat Come Close, and in the recording industry, "product" is released as a holding pattern, or customer-place-holder, while the market awaits the fully hatched product. So we turn our attention to Threat Come Close.

[lahraeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely outstanding poetry: an ethereal, paramount heartache of brilliance from beginning to end. will definitely be revisiting again & again.

[Raven Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty intense poems. Not an easy read due to subject and the way the poems are created makes them poems you need to sit, read and digest slowly.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wide range of forms in this small book is really impressive, and I love the attention to sound that runs through every poem. Very hard hitting.

[Amber Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

[jediShelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent introductory collection of poems

[arden · Rating 1 out of 5]

it didn't make me feel anything