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Trouble Funk
The speaker of Testify returns to divulge his parents’ love story. Set in Anderson, Indiana in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism. Eschewing the “lyrical I” in favor of a third person omniscient point of view, this text exhibits how the latter half of the twentieth century rhymes with our current moment when it comes to political division, the hardships that Black folks face, and the rise of toxic right-wing policies. In many ways, Trouble Funk serves as a prequel to Testify in which Douglas Manuel seeks to better understand and love himself, his family, and his country.
96 pages, Hardcover
Published April 25, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 2, 2023
I wrote the following about this remarkable collection on LitHub:
Trouble Funk is a kind of prequel to [Douglas Manuel's first collection] Testify, and focuses entirely on Manuel’s mother and father. As it describes events prior to Manuel’s birth, Manuel has shed the lyrical “I” entirely, instead approaching scenes as an omniscient god or fly on the wall. The titles of each poem are a nod to his father, a successful DJ in his youth, with titles of songs he loved to spin. We are also given the date of the moment the poem describes (no, “Let’s Get Small” did not come out in 1986).
The dates are vital, for they give us a chronology as we whip between the tender beginnings of Damon and Denise as a couple to Damon’s infidelities and the toxic exchanges that tear them apart. “The song is perfect because he plays / it for her, plays it right then, shines / a light on her” is also part of the life that contains “She screams. He screams. Their scream // the same scream they began with.” Manuel follows this with an accretive list of screams “since the Middle Passage” and ends with “since Civil Rights. // So many screams slicing love.”
Interspersed between the couple’s moments together, we have a sense of menacing police, seeing Roots for the first time, the AIDS epidemic—in short, the environment in which these two people connected. As NewPages states in its review, “Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism.” Manuel has taken two people who would otherwise find themselves flattened into caricature by the media and given them room to be living breathing subjects. In his tender poems, they search for love and meaning in a world that tells them again and again they deserve neither. Now and then, blessedly, they find it.
Trouble Funk is a kind of prequel to [Douglas Manuel's first collection] Testify, and focuses entirely on Manuel’s mother and father. As it describes events prior to Manuel’s birth, Manuel has shed the lyrical “I” entirely, instead approaching scenes as an omniscient god or fly on the wall. The titles of each poem are a nod to his father, a successful DJ in his youth, with titles of songs he loved to spin. We are also given the date of the moment the poem describes (no, “Let’s Get Small” did not come out in 1986).
The dates are vital, for they give us a chronology as we whip between the tender beginnings of Damon and Denise as a couple to Damon’s infidelities and the toxic exchanges that tear them apart. “The song is perfect because he plays / it for her, plays it right then, shines / a light on her” is also part of the life that contains “She screams. He screams. Their scream // the same scream they began with.” Manuel follows this with an accretive list of screams “since the Middle Passage” and ends with “since Civil Rights. // So many screams slicing love.”
Interspersed between the couple’s moments together, we have a sense of menacing police, seeing Roots for the first time, the AIDS epidemic—in short, the environment in which these two people connected. As NewPages states in its review, “Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism.” Manuel has taken two people who would otherwise find themselves flattened into caricature by the media and given them room to be living breathing subjects. In his tender poems, they search for love and meaning in a world that tells them again and again they deserve neither. Now and then, blessedly, they find it.
May 22, 2023
Family history, tour of late 20th century music, and celebration of Black love in the face of injustice—all in one! These poems are so dense with music that they beg to be read aloud. And I’ve never seen slant rhyme deployed in tercets as perfectly as in Manuel’s “Humpin, 1980.” Read this wonderful book!
July 29, 2025
Well done. Really well done.
I saw that someone on here gave this collection a 1 star, but I’m guessing their finger just slipped on the ratings bar and something crazy important came up and they simply forgot to come back and correct it. Or they just didn’t bother to read the whole book, and that’s a real shame. Either way, my condolences.
I saw that someone on here gave this collection a 1 star, but I’m guessing their finger just slipped on the ratings bar and something crazy important came up and they simply forgot to come back and correct it. Or they just didn’t bother to read the whole book, and that’s a real shame. Either way, my condolences.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews