I'm always so serious Poems

The striking debut from Price meditates on Blackness, racial history, family lineage, and grief in poems centered in New Orleans and New York City. Multiple poems address New Orleans' rhythm and blues keyboardist James Booker: in "James Booker Speaks to Ringo Starr About His Bodyguard Taking His Eye," the speaker asks, "Show me/ how you fight and I'll/ show you how to possess/ Chopin and turn him/ into something darker/ than his own shadow./ Little Lazarus, why wasn't it you/ who yanked the song/ out of me? I blessed/ the bloody knuckle/ with the percussion/ you could not make." "We Wear Each Other's Names after reading If Beale Street Could Talk and The Odyssey" inventively recasts characters of both works, as in "III. Tish recast as Penelope": "I say I live in a shushing (a woman waiting while a hero is out). Can you tell me it doesn't hurt to live here? Can you return to (for) me, silence me out of witnessing my selves: unmistakably American (I stab the onions), I wash a boy's hair in a warehouse fashioned into love, sleep (I never do this)." This formally innovative collection rewards readers with its memorable and incisive reflections. (Feb.)

In a distinctive debut illuminating Black life in the United States, Price offers a startling number of taut, to-the-point aperçus, working not so much by lyrical turn as by the captured moment, the homed-in-on truth of "overworked fathers and damaged mothers," the "commonwealth of hooded children," the murdered, the enslaved whose burial sites are unknown, the "bodies [that] have been thrown away." "We can't be free, we live here," she explains; "what to do in a country that never wanted me…?" The plaintive observation about "the brilliant strangeness of watching everyone not you grow comfortable with themselves" gives ways to the sobering "If a tall man in/ blue is ready to do what he does, what/ does that make me but a slave?" These gemlike observations keep piling up, with the poet's native New Orleans the main setting and New York, where she studied, also appearing. One series of poems recasts the Odyssey via If Beale Street Could Talk, while another celebrates music (a piano wittily tells its player, "I created you to glorify me"). Throughout, the poet demonstrates a keen eye for connection, as in a poem on the manifold meanings of fold. VERDICT An assured debut from a writer to watch.--Barbara Hoffert