DARK TESTAMENT

Smith offers a collection of blackout poems honoring victims of anti-Black violence using text from George Saunders’ award-winning Lincoln in the Bardo (2017).

The poet shares in her introduction that as the mother of Black sons, when George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery were murdered, she “found the agony crushing” and “struggled to navigate it.” The poems utilize passages from Saunders’ experimental novel, which Smith was reading in May 2020, to reflect on the lives and deaths of Floyd, Arbery, Philando Castile, Rodney King, and others. Except for Aiyanna Jones, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor, the focus is on the killing of boys and men, although some poems speak from the perspectives of victims’ mothers. An entry from the point of view of Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, reads “I shall take away from here this resolve: / no more. // Dear boy, / That is a promise.” Another standout is “White Witnesses”: “Much that was New & Strange & / Unnerving had occurr’d this night. We / watched it all unfold from On-High: safe, separate, & Free- / the way we liked it.” Photos of murals and memorials honoring some victims are moving while providing necessary emotional space for readers. Other poems raise questions, as when the narrator of “Black Witness” says they were “still too under siege myself to care” about the identity of the victim of an overheard act of violence, or when Eric Garner is described as being rendered “a weak passive child.”

Heartfelt, if uneven.