Spit Back a Boy: Poems

Cave Canem Poetry Prize

by Iain Haley Pollock, Elizabeth Alexander (Foreword)

Iain Haley Pollock’s poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, “Sea, you is ugly,” from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book—in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: “I flung my almost white self / into my mother’s embrace—that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker.” Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator’s hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox.

Even when these poems soften, they can’t be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock’s collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow.

Genres: Poetry, Cultural

72 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2011

About the author

Iain Haley Pollock's second collection of poems, Ghost, Like a Place, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in September 2018. His debut collection, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Pollock teaches English at Rye Country Day School in Rye, NY, and is a member of the poetry faculty at the Solstice MFA program of Pine Manor College. He also serves as a poetry co-editor at Solstice Literary Magazine. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Callaloo, among other publications.

Reviews

[Molly]

It's not bad, just weak. I got about 30 pages in and realized I could barely remember a single thing I'd read. If the poetry isn't life-changing, I don't want it.

[Alan King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man, Iain Haley Pollock’s speaker in Spit Back A Boy is the invisible underdog. He’s a man torn between his “black mother’s blood”[1] and his white father. And, like Ellison’s invisible narrator, Pollack’s speaker battles the stereotypes that make him invisible since he’s not seen as a real person. This journey to identity is an involved one through which Pollack’s speaker revisits the middle passage[2] and Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath[3]. Along the way he encounters an orisha[4] while roaming Philly’s mean streets[5]. Read the full review at http://bit.do/SpitBackABoy

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Iain Pollock's poems comes a close second to hearing him read them aloud, which was my pleasure since he came as a guest poet to the Frost Place Conference on Teaching and Poetry when I was there. Pollock packs his poems with the kind of rhythms and movement we expect from old blues and jazz singers. He blends the beauty of language with the grace and charm of a man who appears to have become completely comfortable in his skin. Read "The Recessive Gene" and "Oya in Old City," and you'll know what I mean. I will be sharing these poems, and others by this poet, with my students.

[Ysabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, one incredible poet. In this collection he talks a lot about what it's like to be a light skin African American living in the states. How he could have "passed" but chose not to. Filled with Nina Simone-like, jazzy qualities, this is one book you should not pass up, especially if you want to support an author from the local Philly area.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up based on a review from Ronslate.com bi-annual poetry review. I have to say it is a solid work. But it didn't blow me away. I would still recommend it to people becuase it is really solid...But it didn't speak to me the way some other volumes do.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of great things happening in the poetry collection. If I keep reading great poetry collections like this, I may have to reevaluate my stance on poetry.