Threat Come Close

by Aaron Coleman

In his debut collection, Aaron Coleman writes an American anthem for the 21st century, a full-throated lyric composed of pain, faith, lust and vulnerability. Coleman's poems comment on and interrogate the meaning of home and identity for a black man in America, past and present. Guided by a belief system comprising an eclectic array of invented saints—Trigger, Seduction, Doubt and Who—Coleman's quest finds answers in the natural world where "[t]he trees teach me how to break and keep on living."

Genres: Poetry, Race

72 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Underneath narrative is point of view, and if a writer proposes to resist the social patterns in meaning narrative inferentially invites, it is precisely the social, or mass "we" that begins to break down under the assumptions of a cosmopolitan silence, uniformity, or collective identity a level of abstraction up from the personal. Aaron Coleman doesn't always let narrative assume social patterning. In one version of the social characterization narration assumes, he begins "in the copse," i.e, "a small thicket or wood;" one might prefer, especially if one was hiding, a larger one. He's having a pee, if he's driving "Too Far North," but the language carries its own resonances, indeed the volume finds a non-narrative pattern in etymologies that plot no cause in word-histories. "I dare the cold to mold me daily into a bridge | between what I have forgotten and what I owe." If he's another poet, say Stephen Dunn, "Coming Home, Garden State Parkway," he's on a kind of kick in the kairos of a radio dj's loose talk, or waitress flirtation, toll booth operator grace, but if Coleman is driving from St. Louis to Detroit, he may not yet be far North enough, off the "Interstate," "interested in the woman of color working | at this gas station in the middle-of-nowhere Illinois. | The middle of nowhere for someone like me, who | won't ever know her, who won't ever see into the middle of this place I'm standing." "The tension of a silence filled with things unutterable," James Baldwin described, in "Many Thousands Gone," that phantom-middle into which Coleman discovers who he's not. The social pattern is a scheme, Baldwin thought, while in the personal, which Baldwin read out in Richard Wright's Bigger, the individual has become monstrous, until the individual's sense for "we" goes looking for these small connections with Shell service station attendants in the hope of "establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own." Coleman has not forgotten the erotic charge in such a threat. He may bury the currency as it flairs through the surrounding social scene. At that level of abstraction -- it is race, in one strata -- whites will want to sentimentalize some pre-modern dispensation of grace, but as Coleman tropes Baldwin, "it is not a question of memory." More like "the corpse of a red-tailed hawk, swollen, | then frozen in ice, now mid-thaw | in the cattails" -- another copse.

[jediShelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aaron Coleman is able to peel back the layers that mask, crowd, and cover the essential parts of life to let the light shine in and illuminate the human condition in all it's truth and beauty.

[Kassy Lee]

This debut collection features poems that showcase the music of the interior mind. The sound of these poems integrates well with the sense and beautiful journeys of associative and deep rhetoric occur. The philosophical center of this book holds together well. Elements and angles of interrogation recur, obliterate, and reform one another throughout the obsessions with power, God, sight, and being that populate the book. Looking forward to reading more of Coleman!