Justin Phillip Reed, _The Malevolent Volume_

 THIS IS REED'S second collection. His first, Indecency, which won the 2018 National Book Award  for poetry, but I have not read it... to tell the truth, I'm not completely sure how I acquired this one. My copy came with a shipping slip bearing the handwritten message "Thank you for your support!" Is this just an acknowledgement from a small independent press (Coffee House) that appreciates any sale or did I make a donation to something for which this was a thank-you gift? I'm at a loss.

I do plan to look around for Indecency, though, since The Malevolent Volume is a good book. Reed is queer and Black, and the poems engage those dimensions of his identity with a white-hot intensity. A few pages are printed with white letters on black ground, and I was wondering whether those poems are more particularly connected to the theme of blackness. I don't know, though--some of the black-letters-on-white-ground poems definitely connect to the theme of blackness as well. Queerness themes show up often--"What's Left Behind after a Hawk Has Seized a Smaller Bird Midair," "The Lorelei," "The Queen"-- and in some cases the Blackness and Queerness themes memorably braid: "The Whiteness of Achilles," "Minotaur," "In a Daydream of Being the Big House Missus."

What really makes me want to find Indecency, though, is not Reed's engagement with dimensions of identity, fierce though that is, but that he is language-drunk, like Gerard Manley Hopkins or Hart Crane. Samples chosen nearly at random from several poems:

Morning dusted blush across the yawn of a visible mile

through which a prison break of ravens cropped

   ("When What They Called Us Was Our Name")

 

I toed over a storm-blown bit of limb or a jay's broken corpse

the bluebottles had yet to bejewel and swamp with gentles.

   ("Ruthless")

                              Pinky finger

and a clutch, a fist of gloves, shoulder-waist

isosceles like a Dutch chocolate slice [...]

   ("The Hang-Up")

There's something wonderful about young poet taking this much delight in juggling phonemes. Reminds me of Paul Muldoon in his twenties.