ARE YOU READY TO LOVE YOURSELF A BLACK MAN

Bigotry and emotional trauma scar African Americans and their relationships in these poems.

Amos’ blunt language probes racism’s legacy in the minds and hearts of Black men and their loved ones. In the title poem, he notes “the stereotypes linked to the sequences of our genes” that leave Black people “programmed to not love ourselves” while in “Black Deficiency,” he challenges White society to confront its culpability, asking “will you continue to be implicit / in your reinforcement of a supremacist system?” In “Masculinity so Fragile,” he explores how Black men’s insecurities spill over into the mistreatment of women: “Lying. / Cheating. / Using, and abusing, / and yet she still manages / to support us / despite our habits. / Why are belittling names used to identify her social / status?” Probing deeper, “To Be Heard” calls out the conflation of emotional expressivity with unmanliness—“Listen to me complain like a / ‘punk’, / ‘wimp’, / or other suggestive terms / that describe my ‘weakened state’ ”—and extols the possibility that “Love is genderless, / Pure, / Divine.” Several poems plumb the complexities of romance. In the luminous “Synthesis,” love is as foundational as physics—“You’ve become the gravity to my soul / …Our wavelengths intersect for the creation of a new spectrum”—while the plangent “Restrained” charts a drift into mutual incomprehension. “We were once on the same page, / The same sentence, / The same word; /…Then we parted paragraphs, / Sheets, / And now we’re no longer in the same genre.” The author’s depression poems, like the suicidal “Break Up,” get very bleak indeed—“I saw death approaching, / It turned the other way. / I initiated the pursuit, / and now we’re in a chase”—but he recovers a purpose, fatherhood, in “Nothing Else Matters.” “When I was 19... / I was shedding tears because you weren’t born yet, / too eager and desperate to meet up with you.” Amos’ searing verse is direct and plainspoken but studded with incisive metaphors. His critique of racism can be strident at times, but his confessional poems, like “Mechanism of Injury”—“Every time I restructure myself, I get broken and / separated. / I don’t know if I will make it. / Ashamed. / Vulnerable. / Naked”—have a gripping rawness that will resonate with any reader.

Intense, intimate, self-lacerating poetry about unhealed social and psychic wounds.