Shane Book, _Congotronic_

THIS ONE TOO has been on the shelf waiting for a while--among the benefits of retirement is getting around to the books I couldn't find time to read when I bought them, which in the case of Congotronic must have been quite a while ago. It was published in 2014; I think I bought it in 2019 or so, just before the pandemic.

The book's title sounds like a nod to Afrofuturism, which I wasn't sure was a term in much circulation in 2014, but it turns out the earliest citation in the OED is to a 1993 article by Mark Dery in South Atlantic Quarterly. The term seems to be most often used in discussing technology and science fiction  in relation to Black culture and experience; Congotronic deals with neither topic, but the term might nonetheless fit this collection of poetry. Book works with many of the most familiar topoi of Black-centered writing--enslavement, colonization, national liberation, ancient African civilization--and rewires, remixes, and reboots them in a way that both defamiliarizes them and revivifies them, that makes them new.

In "Mack Daddy Manifesto," for instance, the main voice is that of an Iceberg Slim kind of character, but the voice also channels Freud's The Ego and the Id and Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. The effect made me laugh out loud on first reading, but since sex work has affinities with both (a) sex and (b) work, stirring in the voices of Freud and Marx with that of a procurer had a weird aptness.

In "Flagelliforms," a series of poems that blends events from the west African epic Sundiata with contemporary ones, with rapid changes of register and cinematic jump-cut montage.

For me, though, the book's highlight was "The Collected Novellas of Gilbert Ryle." I read Ryle's Concept of Mind way, way back while taking a course called "20th Century Philosophy"; he's a British philosopher for whom the mind is not a thing, but a cluster of events that we interpret to be a thing. Interesting stuff, but the poems Book calls Ryle's "novellas," each with its own title clipped from The Concept of Mind, are quite a bit trippier and maybe more fascinating. What are they about? I don't know! But they use a kind of post-syntactic syntax that reminded me of some of the effects Zukofsky gets in his translations of Catullus. To wit:

He had been busy culling spores
from the frothy air as the para-mechanical
cloud test came in low over the valley.

Or try this:

From where may I not pour me over, a wispy helmsman
nearly undone in fevered looking?

I see Book has a new collection, out last November. I need to find it and not wait five years to read it.