Punching the Air (2020)

I read this book earlier in the year and found it searingly emotional. Beautifully poetic, making both linguistic and visual art of its words, displaying the exquisite spark that remains in a soul even after it’s been beaten down by injustice (premise spoilers.)

Before, people might have called Amal one of the lucky ones. A Black kid from the projects going to a private art school, a teenager with an opportunity to be going places. By their estimation, he threw all that good fortune away the night he got into a fight with a white boy from a respectable family. Now Amal is in juvie, his life contained in a series of boxes. As he navigates his new surroundings, he reckons with how the world sees him and the place it’s made for him. He struggles to process this the only way he knows how, through poetry and art.

This YA poetic narrative was co-written by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, the latter of whom is one of the Exonerated Five. Together, they’ve crafted a raw, emotional portrayal of a boy who’s been let down by the world around him at every turn and then discarded. Amal’s poems are nakedly vulnerable in a way that he doesn’t allow himself to be face-to-face. I really appreciate the recurring motif in which he shares snapshots from his past and present, framing each with “what I want to say” and expressing his honest feelings before retreating into “what I really say,” shrugging everything off with a tough mask of indifference.

Amal takes us through each stage of the corrupt criminal justice system: his lawyer who barely knows him, the pitiful lack of evidence for the trumped-up charges against him, the indiginity of being herded like an animal, the sorry excuse for an education he’s offered in juvie, the guard who takes care to make sure Amal gets a good look at his tattoo of a hanged Black baby. Another amazing thematic throughline comes from the sharp parallels he draws between slavery and mass incarceration. There are poems in which he describes the bus ride to juvie as the Middle Passage, intake as the auction block. There are plenty of adults who think that slavery is long over and dealt with, so it’s powerful to see these comparisons laid out so plainly in a YA book.

And I also like that Amal’s story takes care to show how things were stacked against him long before his arrest. How they only study dead white guys in his art class at school, and when he points that out, his teacher takes that as a sign of him being difficult, insubordinate. About how those white boys came into his neighborhood picking fights with his friends, how there’s an invisible line between their neighborhood and his, and while he and his friends are never allowed to cross it, the white boys are free to act as if they own his home as well as theirs. It’s really sophisticated in how it gradually rolls out all these racial, socio-economic, and political aspects that govern and limit Amal’s world, everything that was already boxing him in.

But for all of that, all the horror, all the injustice, and all the pain, I’m grateful for the glimmers of light. The small things that give Amal hope, the tiny ways he’s able to assert his dignity. Even the bare basics, the way that there’s no box they can put on his thoughts as he expresses his anger and despair in poetry. It has a slight but undeniable “‘hope’ is the thing with feathers” feel to it, and that’s so crucial.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements (including racism and mass incarceration of minors,) violence, and language (including the N-word.)

The Poet X (2018)

Another great YA novel by Elizabeth Acevedo. I think I like this one even better than Clap When You Land. As someone who was a teenage writer, it gets me right in the feels.

Xiomara expresses herself in poetry. At home, she’s constantly battling with her strict Dominican mother. In church, she feels doubts about what she believes but feels judged when she expresses those doubts. In school and on the sidewalk, she’s harassed and objectified for her curves, which her mother then uses as proof that she’s a slut. Only in her writing can Xiomara articulate all that she feels and get closer to the person she wants to be.

Like Clap When You Land, this book is beautifully written in free verse poetry. I love the way Xiomara processes her life, feelings, and experiences through her poems, and it’s especially interesting to see how she approaches her English writing assignments, responding to the prompts with her true answers in poetic drafts before choosing “safer” angles written as more standard essays. I relate to how thoughtful, vulnerable, and poetic she is in writing while struggling to communicate in person.

And honestly, this story just breaks my heart. The questions Xiomara asks and the things she desires don’t make her a bad person, but she’s made to feel like one by her mother’s judgments and expectations. She feels like a criminal in her own home for texting a boy or wanting to skip confirmation class to go to slam poetry club, and every time her mother accuses or punishes or insults her, the gulf between them grows wider and wider. I root so hard for Xiomara to be able to get out from under that, to find a way to live as honestly as she does in her writing.

There are a lot of “issues” at play in the book, and they’re all given complex, nuanced treatment. Whether it’s religion, sexual harassment, family relationships, or emerging desires, Acevedo writes with a deft hand, weaving the ideas she wants to explore seamlessly into the narrative in a way that never feels like it’s getting on a soapbox or “checking off boxes.”

And I like that, while Clap When You Land just happens to be written in verse, The Poet X is specifically about a young poet and her writings. I love the sequences where Xiomara describes the process of writing or compares her own work with other slam poetry she’s heard. Any time she talks about reading/performing one of her poems aloud is magical, because I know all those feelings she talks about, overwhelming and contradictory as they can be. If this book had existed when I was a teenager, I’m not sure how I would’ve felt about it as a whole (I think I wouldn’t have been ready for some of the subject matter in it,) but I think the mere presence of Xiomara as a character would’ve made me feel very seen. Even though she and teenage me were different in many ways, these particular aspects of her as a writer hit home so closely in a way I didn’t often find in books I read back then.

Warnings

Language, sexual content (including sexual harassment,) violence, drinking/smoking references, and strong thematic elements.

Clap When You Land (2020)

I picked up this book knowing little about it, but I came away loving it. Despite the strong YA-ness of it in places, it tells its story beautifully and rounds the characters out in really compelling ways.

Camino and Yahaira live in two different worlds. Camino lives in a small village in the Dominican Republic, where she helps her aunt, the local healer, and waits for her dad in the U.S. to call her on video chat. Yahaira, also Dominican, is a former chess champ living in New York with her parents. However, both girls become bound together through a tragedy, a crashed plane making its way from New York to the Dominican Republic, and neither will ever be the same again.

I’ll start by admitting that the plot itself isn’t terribly revolutionary. Not sure about younger readers, but I myself figured out where things were heading pretty early on. But this book is a great example of the principle “it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it,” because the predictable notes within it really don’t detract from my interest in the book at all. Even when I guessed what was going to happen, I was still invested in the characters and how they were going to react as events moved along.

Both Camino and Yahaira are wonderfully drawn. We see the universal touchstones between them in the midst of how different the trappings of their lives are. In the differences between them, huge elements of privilege and opportunity are at play. On the island, Camino knows what a slender thread of protection separates her from Xero, a predatory man who’s known for conscripting girls her age for sex work, and she dreams of getting away to the States and joining her dad when she goes to college. But the dangerous and frightening parts of Camino’s life don’t mean that Yahaira’s life in New York is thus painless and easy, just as Yahaira’s more fortunate upbringing by comparison doesn’t mean that Camino’s life is nothing but poverty and struggle. The book allows the lives of both girls to be nuanced and complicated, and as more ties are drawn between them, those complexities weave themselves into stunning patterns.

Author Elizabeth Acevedo writes the book entirely in free verse poetry, hopping between the Dominican Republic and New York as the girls take turns on leading the narrative. The way it’s written reminds me a little of a sung-through musical, in that there are a couple distinct varieties of narrative style within the poetry. Some feel like distinct thematic pullouts, a “break” from the action to explore ideas captured through introspective monologues while still threading in elements of the plot (for a musical comparison, think “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” from Sweeney Todd or “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar.) Others are more plot-driven, moving the story forward in a way that still incorporates the beauty/musicality of the poetic devices Acevedo uses (like “Aaron Burr, Sir” from Hamilton or “Happy New Year” from RENT.) In order to tell a story while taking full advantage of the poetic writing style, you need both kinds, and Acevedo balances the two with a deft hand.

Warnings

Sexual content (mostly discussed/implied rather than shown,) language, scenes of violence (including sexual assault,) and strong thematic elements.

Poem: A Letter to MGM, 1928-1933 (2014)

Ordinarily, I post an original piece on the last day of the month, but since August ended on a Sunday, it lost out to new Who and was pushed back until today.  But that's all right; I've started shifting my Buster Keaton posts to Mondays, and August's poem, is quite apropos.

*          *          *

A Letter to MGM, 1928-1933

You bought yourself a comic genius

To set on a shelf,
A somber little clown in slapshoes
Whose flat, crooked hat
Kept his ideas from spilling out.

Buster was just a word
Until he somersaulted down a flight of stairs
And made it a name.

His imagination was kinetic,

And when someone turned him loose,
He was like a wind-machine cyclone.
He built cockeyed patchwork house
That revolved at the foundation
And told silent puns over telegraph wires.
He shared the screen with a bovine leading lady;
He fought a deep-sea duel with a swordfish
And rode the collapse of a crumbling automobile.

He was a slapstick pioneer

Who danced a soft shoe with himself in 1920 –
Two Busters onscreen,
Three Busters side by side,
Nine Busters all in a how’d-he-do-that row.
He knew that a picture
Was something to eat and sleep
And dream,
And he never found a home
In your static joke factories.
It was like enlisting Einstein
To make a vinegar volcano,
Or Turing to crack a Sudoku.

He made pictures that moved,

But you only wanted pictures that talked.
He used to tumble,
End-over-end pirouetting
With an athletic vaudeville grace
That only looked like clumsiness.
He broke his ribs
To tickle ours,
Knowing full well
That stuntmen don’t get the laughs.

When he was yours,

You wrapped your commodity in cotton;
He was an action figure
And you kept him in the package.
At most, you’d let him pratfall,
And in between recitations
Of someone else’s idea of humor,
He’d stumble hard out of frame
With a microphone-shaking crash.

His mind was a Rube Goldberg device

That came up with something
Glittering and original
Every time he turned it over.
He understood that the cab of a car
Could stay afloat and set sail,
That retrofitted stovetops
Could fry records along with eggs,
And that ladders could become seesaws
When he perched, cat-like, in the absolute center.
He drew laughs from anything –
As large as waterfalls of his own construction,
As small as a handful of glue.

He outran rolling, accelerating boulders,

Downtown cattle stampedes,
And armies of Keystone cops.
Only you tripped him up and caught him,
Grinding him down to fit
The round holes
Of your prefab, cookie-cutter comedies.

You picked him up as another star

For your collection
And then wondered why he strained
At the edges of your constellation.
Didn’t you know he wasn’t made
To be contained within
Some tidy studio system?
What did you think would happen
When you tried to hold
A supernova in a box?
Five years with you,
And he was choked down to embers.
He spent the rest of his life
Scrambling up the side of his career
Like a fire escape,
Slowly fanning himself
Back into
Light.