Review: Joshua Young and JK Anowe Chapbooks
On Joshua Young’s Weekends of Sound: A 764 Hero Mixtape and JK Anowe’s Sky Raining Fists
by Tyler Truman Julian
Rarely do poetry chapbooks get the attention and critical engagement that their full-length counterparts receive, though by their very short nature, chapbooks contain, perhaps, a more cohesive intensity and masterful control of subject and form. Much like the short story to the novel, chapbooks must have the same, if not more, emotional impact as a full-length poetry collection, all while remaining tightly self-contained. It’s for these reasons I’d argue we need more critical engagement with chapbooks and why I admire presses that deal solely in chapbooks or treat their publication as equally important as full-length collections.
This past year, contributors Joshua Young and JK Anowe both had chapbooks published by Madhouse Press, a micro press dedicated to publishing hand-sewn, limited edition chapbooks, released in pressruns of 100. Though limited edition, these two chapbooks are remarkably universal at their emotional core. Even though each tracks speakers on entirely different continents, desire runs through both, more specifically the desire for love. At their base, these chapbooks interrogate what it means to be loved and what it means to desire love.
In the wake of a failed marriage, Joshua Young’s speaker clarifies, “What I’m saying is, love is everywhere / & I want to feel it, / so why can’t it be in a poem?” then asks, “Tell me, what will real love raise over the trees?” (“Nobody Knows This is Everywhere”). Young’s speaker turns to sound, music, city life, and ultimately, memory to find answers to these questions. Throughout the collection, he wrestles with sentimentality and its place in identity, in art. He asks, “[W]hat the hell am I crying about?” and declares,
It’s easy to edit out the wreckage
digging through the calendar.
My friends knew
the corpse like crawl.
If history flickers truth,
our future isn’t anything to fret over.
Like, I know
what it’s like to fall in love— (“Nobody Knows This is Everywhere”)
There is pain in this search, and it requires sound, music, and poetry to be heard, fleshed out. In fact, I think this speaker would lie to me if he existed outside of the chapbook. He’d look me in the face and say, I’m fine. The speaker needs the page to work out the pain he feels, the heartache, and know it is okay to really feel and take off his rose-colored glasses. It takes the entirety of the chap for Joshua Young’s speaker to give us the image of a bridge, hope that there is a road that leads out of trauma and heartbreak into some sort of new future. Through his eyes, we see: “The bridge stretches across a dead river” (“The Can’t See”).
Half the world away, JK Anowe’s speaker leads us on similar searches. Deep into this speaker’s past we are asked to explore familial relationships and those that tie us to a particular piece of land. Anowe’s speaker explores the legacy of war, of institutional and personal violence, and how to reckon with it, how to ultimately forgive himself for the sins of his father, his country, and love himself. There is obvious pain here, and the speaker reels. He tells us,
…you perhaps wonder if it is the
ground that shivers on impact
how the finger gropes to gratify
the wound to remind the bodypart
it’s still here which is to say before
biting down you spit on every
thing to soften the pain (“Finding Middleground by Way of Digression”)
These are the words of a fractured speaker, struggling through a past impacting his present, who seeks to make himself whole, no longer compartmentalizing each part of himself. These words are also erotic, almost violent. It seems impossible to shake the violence. Even as the speaker attempts to find love with a woman, there is a caveat:
…I love her
with these hands despite dirt & gunpowder shreds of
self-mutilated
skin underneath fingernails from clawing 3 years of genocide
out my baffled bloodline (“Blue Boy Intimacy”)
The speaker chooses to love, but he is still “self-mutilated,” still not whole because of this generational violence. Like Young’s speaker, Anowe’s seems truer within the poem than in any situation we could extrapolate him into outside of the chapbook. As he seeks to redefine himself and love himself, he calls out other poets who do not wrestle with the questions he allows himself. Without the complexity, without attempting to pull all the fractured pieces into one, the work would only be an “obvious poem / excusing genocide” (“It’s Not Love as You Know It”). We don’t know if this speaker ever totally contextualizes his past, but, how could he? Instead, the chapbook’s short form pulls us into a place of empathy, if not understanding, and warns us that if we do not attempt to answer these questions of complicity in our own lives, we’ll only ever be cursed by “a constant fallback into sleep // into dreams / the circumference / of a sedative” (“An Unearthing in the Head”). For Anowe’s speaker, this awareness seems enough for him to choose to love himself, at least for the moment. Still, as he warns of the risk of “fallback,” we know the struggle for understanding, for reconciliation must continue on.