An incredibly powerful collection of poetry from Clarke, who is an Australian poet of Afro-Caribbean descent. The poems center the reader in Clarke’s world and viewpoint, a place where women and people of color have it hard; even as she paints that world in heartbreaking detail, she colors it with her fierce resolve to fight back, to stand together, to grow strong. The title is actually a line from the poem “something sure,” in which a Black mother sits her son down and tells him to pay attention: she is raising him to be a good man, one who knows “how decent folk behave,” but he needs to know: there are times when other men can be a danger to women, and when those times arise, she needs her son to be the kind of man who will step in, to intervene as only a fellow man can. It’s chilling, heartbreaking, and beautiful.
Tag: type-poetry
Counting Descent, by Clint Smith
The poems in this collection are beautiful and sharp, reflecting Smith’s experience as a black man growing up in a society determined to distrust black men. It’s a sober topic but he also brings beauty and joy into the poems, and also defiant pride in his heritage and his home town of New Orleans. Favorites included what the cicada said to the black boy, about survival and hiding, and the titular Counting Descent, which encapsulates his family history in numbers.