Besaydoo

by Yalie Saweda Kamara

(Milkweed Editions, 2024) 

Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

You know that delicious shock when sounds you can almost understand suddenly transform into words? Like when you realize “Besaydoo” means “Be safe dude.” We discover this, as does the speaker’s mother, in the title poem of Yalie Saweda Kamara’s award-winning first book. The speaker and her mother then adopt this phrase as their mantra: “Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like / some word from deep in somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we / saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous sun. Besaydoo.” Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer and a native of Oakland, California. In a wide range of poetic forms, she explores the ruinous and tender.

This book is wider and taller than average. It has to be. Kamara’s line lengths range from the five-syllable lines of haiku to lines that reach 33 syllables. The ten-page poem “Aunty X Becomes a Unit of Light,” begins “While looking in the mirror, my Aunty X surveys her head, wondering if her alopecia has been a / lifelong exercise in losing parts of herself,” a line that spans the entire page, and a sentence that goes even longer. These long lines appear both in poems that have the feel and shape of a lyric essay, as well as those where the line length ranges wildly between, and within, stanzas. 

The long line length lets Kamara set a conversational tone and teaches us to read as we might a narrative, paying attention to character, setting, and plot development. Her shorter lines serve in a different way. In “A Poem for my Uncle,” she writes:

My uncle came back from the dead the color of

    a strobe light, float-walked above

    the church’s maroon carpet pressing

    into the pulse of every living thing in the sanctuary.

Ending a line “the color of” heightens anticipation. The color of what? And we have to wait for the answer. Putting “a strobe light, float-walked above” as its own line multiplies meanings: both the uncle (as part of the sentence) and the strobe light (from the stand-alone line) get to float-walk. And the short lines slow the reader down and ask them to focus on the imagery, the sounds (pressing, pulse) as well as the overall meaning of the sentence. In her wide-ranging use of lines, it’s like Kamara is saying, “Every tool in the poetry toolbox is mine to use, and I will use it how I want.” 

Uncles, aunts, a brother, a mother—family, who have come from Sierra Leone and must engage with cultural shifts, form a central theme in this book. We hear odes to lumpia and stories of eating malombo fruit in Freetown, but this book also takes place in the racism of America. In “I Ask My Brother Jonathan to Write about Oakland, and He Describes His Room,” we learn of a brother who hugs his own flesh [so] the “X his arms make across his chest is not mistaken for a target.” Unlike how popular culture often depict Black men, Kamara shows us loved ones who are real and vulnerable. And also unlike much of popular culture, she does not shy away from the specificity of racism in America. She includes a series of poems about the Nia Wilson memorial, and in “Bloomington, Indiana Part I” she writes:

What I knew, but did not want to know, was that a friend was called a monkey and spat on around the corner from my apartment. What I remembered, but did not want to remember, was the car with the tinted windows that once followed me for blocks. What I recall, but want to forget, is why we never stop for gas in Martinsville.

The equivocating “what I knew, but did not want to know” gives these images a terrible poignancy, makes the speaker’s witness more real, vivid, and hard-hitting. 

She witnesses violence, racism, and resistance. When the Black football player Marshawn Lynch refused to answer reporters’ questions, Kamara understands this moment as a thrilling refusal to capitulate: “I too have wanted to become a miracle / in my own Black mouth.” This book is filled with the miracles of Black resistance and joy starting from the first poem “Oakland as Home, Home as Myth.” It includes a repeated monostich line “Oakland is a killing field, they say” a terrifying drone that we are taught to consider suspect by the “they say.” The speaker and her community don’t feel this way about Oakland—outsiders do. Kamara contrasts that disparagement of her home with lines of sensory delight and celebration:

               The upper level of the MacArthur BART Station

    smells like Palmer’s Cocoa Butter because being ashy in The Town

    is worse than jaywalking. The aroma of chocolate blankets the opposing

    platforms, while warm air kisses bare ankles and calves

Here is a magical world where the very air smells delicious because of how the people care for themselves. In “Sweet Baby Fabulist,” Kamara tells us a three-year-old nephew calls everything Black: 

               Black is what he called the universe,

    to show us how much he loved her. Black 

    were the rainbows, the full moon and the deep nightfall.

    Black were the rivers and sky. God was as Black

    as the autumn breeze’s call. 

This child sees a Black universe full of love and beauty. The syntax of “Black were” combined with the repetition and rhymes (nightfall, call) make the poem sing like a lullaby. With these techniques, the poem becomes both a witness to Black joy and a promise to protect those who can see the world this way.

Throughout the book, this is a promise we hear a speaker making to herself. Several poems refer to getting sober, deleting Tinder, moving away from the worst of Midwestern racism because those patterns and places keep her from Black joy. In “Elegy for My Two Step” she tells us:

    Before the spirits left me, I used to sway

    with some sort of lubricated ease inside

    a dingy crescent of bodies that reeked of

    2$ Dickel shots and buzzed with Tinder

    pheromones.

The “dingy crescent” of this old life contrasts with the full moon the child sees. The poem ends, “I touch my blessed, undying self.” She has rebuilt herself. “Besaydoo,” the saying, means the community is watching out for you. Besaydoo, the book, celebrates the importance of that community but also shows a speaker bringing herself healing and joy. 

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, and Grist, among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Waste Management Facility

by Scott Withiam

(MadHat Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Carla Panciera

In a waste management facility, waste products are altered chemically, physically, and biologically for a variety of reasons. Scott Withiam does the same for the ordinary world around us in his latest collection (his third). Nothing ends up as it begins, resisting the usual predictions, long held notions, and plain logic. The result is an imaginative and singular adventure through a world we thought we knew.

 

The early pages of the book seem anchored enough in reality. The opening section focuses on the rustic landscape of a childhood spent “speeding across corn flats to the lake,” driving deer for hunters with a friend, and recalling the taste of a grandfather’s homemade pickles. But even the first poem, “Draft”, establishes the idea of an imbalance that is alluring and poses an important question. The speaker’s grandmother scales a wall at an overlook and leans into winds, imploring him to join her. “She kept telling me to step up, look, / but I covered my face,” he says, perhaps referring to the present danger or to some version of his own future in which, he too, will either be forced to let go, eschew sense, or continue to observe the world from a safe distance. Which, one wonders, would be preferable?

 

The question is perhaps answered in “Men’s Room” where a lone gas station attendant behind glass one night is a reminder of  “unattended / animals . . . in a failed zoo, catatonic, / rubbing the same spot in a chain-link fence.” There are many ways to exist within the spectrum of balancing on the edge of violence to being stifled in a literal cage. 

 

In “One Man Show” the speaker views paintings of familiar landscapes that capture grief, but he claims he is “not interested in any artist’s abstractions.” Rather, he longs to be grounded in the what is, to remain far from the ledge, perhaps the antithesis to poetry and certainly to many of the poems that follow. Here is how we manage, these first poems seem to say: Children navigate the fraught relationships of adults, adults reconcile painful aspects of their own pasts, all of us process grief.

Despite our attempts to tread carefully, it is impossible to ignore what threatens our peace, even when it happens offstage. In the poem “Hard Candy,” a young boy is admonished by an older person not to choke on a treat. While the warning is generic enough, actions outside the stuffy parlor where “three clocks ticking . . . / chased each other. One just had to take / the lead” is a scene that increasingly portends violence. Here and elsewhere, the poet bears witness to the small dramas of relationships and the larger social issues of migrant workers, failing farms, and boarded up factories, far from any abstract concepts of reality. If only we could exist in the world without internalizing its images, we wouldn’t need any alterations in what we find. 

 

Instead, we embark on an experience that is anything but a preservation of realism. People strolling along a beach are “bugs on a jawbone . . . pill bugs topside and topsy-turvy.” When breakfast with an old friend becomes tense, one man imagines himself as a chief petty officer on the eighteenth century New England streets full of “coopers, cordwainers, and shipwrights.” Another poem’s speaker imagines a discussion between the lovers where the woman becomes “as tight-lipped as a mollusk” and the man wonders, “And what did that make me? A greasy dumpster raccoon / feeling around for a clam underwater.” 

 

The heart of the book centers around lessons learned from the speaker’s job at a waste treatment plant: look busy, keep out of trouble, and observe the world through a clear lens that often relies on humor and the ability to manipulate language—the perfect internship for a young poet: 

 

As for feeling bad about being paid to

or about being removed from view

or about cheating taxpayers

or wrestling with the value

of a hard day's work or complicity,

I’m sorry, none of those concerns surfaced. 

 

The young man’s candor and his acceptance of his role matures into a realization that what keeps people most busy is avoiding solutions. Kids convince themselves they can’t learn algebra. Teachers can’t control the chaos in the cafeteria. Scientists can’t determine what has killed the birds they study. No one can slice a block of cheese with the proffered knife. When a former chemist flees his own country and ends up cleaning professors’ offices, his supervisor reminds him not to finish his day too early: “‘We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. Then what would there be?’”  The void, of course. Time to confront real questions. No wonder we spend so much of our lives engaged in the meaningless and make so little progress. The only employee who demonstrates any initiative in these poems is a blue jay (yes, the bird) who, fired from his job at a funeral home because he made a nest in the hair of the deceased, earns a new position as a concierge because the manager can’t imagine “who better to direct visitors to the most interesting places.” In Withiam’s world, this scenario is less ridiculous than reality. 

 

In these pages it is the non-poets who reach for creative expression—a brochure writer, the colleague trying to describe his golf swing, the woman who “had called curtains / of squalls giant jellyfishes, when a child / living on a high plateau.” By contrast, in “The Angry Estate Gardener,” the eulogists at a friend’s memorial service who are poets, lose their craft when they most need it. The speaker listens to their maddening chorus of platitudes. Meanwhile, he remembers the story his late friend told of the time he worked with a gardener who raised koi and banana trees to sell to the rich. The only marvel to a man wealthy enough to rent the trees for a party, is that they can stand on their own despite such shallow roots. “No one can stand on their own,” the friend offers, “covering, all at once, a lot of territory— from gardener to the great idea of global share so far from carried out, to poets—and right there was let go on the spot.” 

 

Withiam isn’t subject to treacle and sentimentality. He’s disgruntled, sarcastic, impatient with ornamentation. He’s very much part of the “real” world. (He reads People Magazine in doctors’ offices, pauses on his way to teach a class, surprised to hear an admissions tour guide using the fact that the school has Aaron Hernadez’s brain. “But where’s the heart?” he wonders?) But he is also capable of producing poems in which suitcases are interviewed by detectives, and a hibiscus, hybridized beyond all fragrance, dreams of hatching a mockingbird to once again distinguish itself. One of the final poems begins with a couple’s first promising night together and then veers into a dream world where manholes speak to the woman trying to escape her new lover, in part because he corrects her vocabulary. 

 

Even the sacred art of poetry itself can be reexamined through Withiam’s lens. In an attempt to win a poetry contest to make his mother proud before she dies, he is only partially successful. He wins, but is accompanied to the reception by his mother’s ghost who assures him “‘that poetry can transport anyone great distances.’” Instead of finding this inspiring, he is unable to write. Instead, he takes a job dressed as the Statue of Liberty, standing on a street corner and waving motorists into the parking lot of a tax preparation office. Solutions ahead!

 

In Waste Management Facility, Scott Withiam asks his readers what the grandmother in the first poem asked: Will you stand here on this ledge? As the wind howls and blows your coattails like sails, will you forego your safety net? Are you prepared to see what happens when, uncaged, unbound by logic, you, instead, trust in a balancing act between what is and what can be? The answer, of course, especially where these poems are concerned, is yes.

Carla Panciera’s newest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in numerous journals including Poetry, Nimrod, and the Los Angeles Review. Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. Her poetry collections are One of the Cimalores (Cider Press Review Award) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Prize). A third collection is forthcoming in November 2025 from Bordighera Press.

Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Winter 2024

Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney 

(Macmillan to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

Irish author and literary anti-hero Sally Rooney is out with her newest, Intermezzo. Rooney, ever an astute observer of the

human predicament, doesn’t disappoint in this novel about family, chess, and the gritty messiness of grief and forgiveness.

Her distinctive prose style rises to the level of poetry,

repeatedly, distinguishing her as a writer who constantly pushes the boundaries of her craft.

—Shari Zollinger

& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love

by aby kaupang 

(Parlor Press, 2023)

Lightning strikes a house amidst its residents’ profound grief, serving as both fire and aperture, this jolt giving way across

the book's expansive poem to “lightening” and “miracle & practice.” It is emblematic of the larger lyric project kaupang has built across multiple books over 15 years. Her poems are a navigation of grief’s potential to be both precise and all encompassing, but also a study of adaptation and love’s ability to suture home and body amidst loss.

—Michael McLane

What Small Sound

by Francesca Bell

(Red Hen Press, 2023)

Spending time with Francesca Bell’s collection, I understand what it must feel like to be ocean, reaching in for mouthfuls of shore, gorging on a surplus of sand like glass teeth, porcelain shells like splintered slivers of nail. Everything gritty. Everything sharp. Everything too much and yet, feeling like I couldn’t get enough. Bell’s poems hold nothing back, dealing honestly and poignantly with the intimacies of womanhood, motherhood, love, desire, and life’s many griefs. Hers is a book you will return to again and again.

—Samantha Samakande

Litany for the Long Moment

by Mary-Kim Arnold

(Essay Press, 2018)

This book-length lyric essay from a press known for excellent hybrid nonfiction investigates the nature of identity through

Arnold's history as a Korean-born American adoptee. Shaping the text are government questionnaires and other documents from the search for her Korean parents. Here the friction between the bureaucracy of selfhood and the individual spirit of selfhood reckons with a past dismantled by politics. 

—Katherine Indermaur

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing

by Adam Moss

(Penguin Press, 2024))

An insightful guide for multimodal writers, The Work of Art explores how ideas materialize into diverse aesthetic forms, offering practical strategies and reflections that resonate with those who blend text, visuals, audio, and more. Drawing on artist interviews and process artifacts, the book’s cross-disciplinary approach demystifies creativity, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in how varied modalities contribute to a cohesive, expressive work.

—Ben Gunsberg

Full Moon Coffee Shop

by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

(Ballantine Books, 2024)

If the idea of Brigadoon as a kind of pop-up (full moons only) cake shop in Japan, run by a tortoiseshell cat who reads the horoscope of people (a script writer and a TV exec) in need of the kind of guidance only a tortoiseshell might offer in the middle of the night sounds good, then this book is for you. Dreams within dreams. 

I’m on a Japanese-novelsin- translation binge lately, so I thought, “Why not?” I’m pleased I did.

—Neil Flatman

AT RISK

by Teresa Cader

(Ashland Poetry Press, 2024) 

Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff

Teresa Cader’s AT RISK journeys through dangerous territory. Sometimes, as in the title poem, it’s a dog park where a rescue dog, “beaten silly for missing pheasants,” cowers; outside a local diner, a mother lies “slumped over the steering wheel” after discovering her son has OD’d. Or it’s the bombing of “the city whose name sticks on my tongue / the way / Buczkowice once did, my father’s Polish village…." The book follows a family split by war and displacement, a father whose silence inflicts its own pain, and flash bulletins from an increasingly damaged world. But Cader’s poems embrace moments of rapture as well: cousins discover each other, children are born, an unquiet mind finds peace while fish replenish a river. Cader accomplishes all this with a masterful sense of form—her ghazals, sonnets, and couplets complement inventive free verse, their music always fresh. 

Cader’s poems match life’s daily details to the surreal aftermath of suffering. News of a “live shooter in an elementary school” morphs kitchen chairs into circus elephants, the speaker in “Thoughts and Prayers” retreating under a tent, “half-smothering the children inside me.” A peacock, avatar of Homer, struts on her deck, “its hundred eyes… in the kitchen / as I knead my floured mound of dough.” When its feathers catch “glints of sun from the window, / …Homer’s soul opens like a peony in the garden.” “Pythagoras Said the Soul of Homer Moved into a Peacock” continues: 

    I’ve learned my grandmother kept a pet peacock 

    as a security system. It shrieked when the Nazis 

    

    stormed her road, but she and my young aunt and uncle 

    fled weeks earlier on the last ship for New York. 

Cader links the everyday act of making bread to the soul of a poet resplendent as a peacock’s tail or a peony, then to the storms of invasion and flight—all within the span of a few dozen lines. 

The poet’s curiosity spans subjects as various as the grotesque results of the Fukushima disaster—radioactive wild boars—to a tenth-century surgeon who refuses to drill the skull of a boy haunted by his rape. Instead, Cader imagines, al-Zahwari assures the boy he believes him, bending “to whisper, Absolutely.” In these and other poems, Cader explores the ways love, terror, and wisdom are bound to the body. In her witty homage to Dolly Parton, “Ode to Teased Hair,” bouffant birds courting at her window spark a “memory of myself with a teased mop in high school”; the blue-collar boys “wore leather,” while middle-class kids—with Breck-girl hair, we assume—“went to college and France.” Cader quotes words from the singer’s lips, “a gobsmacking vermillion,” to show how easy it is to humiliate and other a class by mocking their bodies, clothes, and accents. “Happy Hour with Chaucer” recalls “sounding out your hammered pentameter,” in a neck brace, his Canterbury pilgrims “distraction // from my doctor’s prognosis that I might never really / walk again. / I could read, so I could travel beyond my body.” Confined by the pandemic as it was isolated in college, Cader’s body finds liberation through art. 

At the center of AT RISK is “Poland: A Fugue,” both family history and reminder of how “the war to end all wars” spawned horrors for those who emigrated to escape and those left behind to endure the Nazis and Soviets. In “Shortwave Radio: September 1, 1939,” Cader’s father’s silence about his Polish family—cousins, a brother, and an aunt never acknowledged—might have begun with survivor’s guilt over news of Hitler’s invasion delivered to a group of émigré fishing buddies: “… how long did the broadcast last, / telling them what they knew without being told—Your family will eat dust behind tanks, / your village will be fire without water, and you who got out can do nothing.” 

One of AT RISK’s most brilliant and harrowing poems is a dramatic monologue in the voice of twentieth-century German villagers browsing a selection of children seized from Poland. “Forced Labor” begins:

 

    Thrust into the platz, wobbly-legged, bleating whatever it is boys bleat 

           when they’re on the bench, sized up and sized down, how strong, 

    

    how much will he eat, can he learn German, what about his momma, 

           will a beating or two knock her out of him, does he have lice 

Notice the staccato lines, how “wobbly-legged” wobbles against “boys bleat / when they’re on the bench,” how the hard consonants continue with “up,” “down,” and “strong” as Cader crafts her litany of monstrous appraisal. The villagers worry about the future—will the boys grow “interested in sexual things” forbidden to them, “with their blood subhuman and their brains primitive….” These fears echo in the language of today’s politics. The poem’s final lines return to the clipped, one- and two-syllable language of the first, the villagers satisfied that after their use, “only the dregs” will be left, “his life wrung from him like whiskey from a flattened leather flask.” The shriveling of life into leather, its full skin flattened, enacts a clinical taxidermy in which human bodies become throwaway trash: authoritarian philosophy in a nutshell. 

AT RISK also reckons with the risks of love. It’s the repeating end-word in “Ghazal of the Goats”—“Not the lyric song of shepherds, my love / bleats ungodly tunes in private”—that introduces the union between “Goat Man Ches McCartney” and “a Spanish knife-thrower, his near-miss lethal lover” to that lover's wry consideration of a long marriage: “In my act, you don’t flinch, duck, scrape, or bow. / It appears you’re an idiot for love.” Cader feels the awe of first-time motherhood in “Paean”: “Out of our bodies we made a world, named / after ourselves, not knowing / whether it harbored a rage we might never understand, / or a god come to save us.” But awe doesn’t erase the wit of those first eleven words. “Paean” ends with images of renewal, as the couple build a haven from the world’s alarms: 

    Let me lead you now across that field 

    of buttercups, loosestrife's riot of purple, 

    across a doorsill that opens into our sanctuary, 

    to windows scraped clean from winter. 

AT RISK’s finale is a discursive, fluid exemplar of juxtaposition, an art Cader deploys throughout her verse. Efforts to restore fish to a local lake in “Urban River Run” unite pilgrims, Thoreau, volunteers hauling buckets before the advent of fish ladders, and Cader’s family memories. She becomes census taker, watching an underwater video camera as eels “sleek-tail-it upstream nearby, / next to roads jammed with traffic.” When musing over fish, her staggered, flexible stanzas lap the page from margin to margin as they mimic the run of thought: 

    Immigrants from the Pilgrims onward 

    lived on river herring, shad, salmon. 

    Silver running they’d called 

    the spring herring migrations so abundant 

    they colored the rivers 

Thought consolidates in the poem’s final stanza, a summary of strategies to survive the threats of nature, nurture, and history: 

    When I worry about my daughters far from home, 

            I can count fish at my river. 

    When I worry about my foot swelling in the heat, 

            I can count fish in my living room. 

    When the stink of traffic and gas leaks on Massachusetts Avenue 

            makes me long for the ocean, 

    I can go to the Mystic Lakes and watch a blue heron on shore. 

            I can uproot Oriental bittersweet. 

            I can prepare for the run back to the sea. 

AT RISK was selected by Mark Doty as winner of Ashland Poetry Press’ 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize (available at AshlandPoetryPress.com/product/at-risk). Its vision aligns the past with the present, art with survival, and family with memory in poems that wring the heart with pathos and shift the mind with epiphanies. Teresa Cader’s AT RISK offers a dazzling, breathtaking response to the perplexities of our times. 

No Sweet Without Brine

by Cynthia Manick

(Amistad, 2023) 

Reviewed by Kashawn Taylor

The unapologetic Blackness of Cynthia Manick’s poetry in No Sweet Without Brine is what makes the writing shine as though the poems are lathered with cocoa butter.  The collection ensures the reader knows that we are “living, not just alive.”  It is a fruit, both sweet and sour, familiarly and painfully refreshing.  

In “I Try to Imagine Them Smitten,” Manick writes about Black love, and her parents’ specifically. The language here is mostly simple, without pomp and flourish, but it is a testament to Manick’s skill with words that she does not have to use esoteric diction to create something beautiful, moving. The poem opens, “I’ve never seen my parents’ kiss” and goes on to describe a photograph in which her parents appear and tries to imagine them “smitten / past the slammed doors / past the obsidian quiet” musing that perhaps it only happened once, presumably to create her. This poem speaks volumes on Black love, how quiet and stoic it appears to the outsider. How even a daughter finds it difficult to imagine her parents smitten.  

Manick plays with form and white space in poems such as “Tanka Suite on Survival” and “Litany for My Fears and Questions.” In the former, she references cultural events like Hurricane Katrina—a notoriously devastating natural disaster for the Black community—and, in the latter, asks, “Is it wrong to want a storm named after you?” The juxtaposition of these two poems demonstrates the conflict within Black women: to mourn the dead exhaustedly from a storm / to want be the storm.  

Keeping the storm imagery in “Dear Superman,” she writes that Superman flies past “women of strong flavors” and “hot peppers between their legs / and a storm inside.” Manick asserts Superman flies past these women of color in favor of the Lois Lane-type because they “secretly stir [him] from liver to toenail.” The poem, however, ends with a sort of pleading, telling Superman that those ignored women too desire “strong arms” and “have dreams of sleeping between stars.”

The book speaks to me in subtle ways. Manick’s use of the Eintou inspired me. The form, which takes its name from West African for “pearl” contains thirty-two syllables and is meant to give the reader insight on something, a new piece of information.—pearls of wisdom, if you will. In Manick’s “Eintou for Possibility," she writes that the “gap between / my teeth is actually / a portal.”  The gap in front teeth is common among Black people; I have one myself. In this poem Manick turns a common imperfection into something magical, “a world where all the / gaps meet.”

Manick’s switches voices effortlessly throughout, using what is commonly called a “blaccent” in poems like “Livin’ Flush” to using proper grammar in the next piece, “Girls Like Me Are Made Of….” The narrators in these poems showcase and celebrate all different types of Black, whether you speak pretty or not. 

No Sweet Without Brine lives up to its title. While there is sweetness in this ode to Blackness, there is also a sourness that comes with it. From enjoying listening to Idris Elba on a sleep app to a poem about self-care titled “Notes Toward a Poem on Self-Care,” Manick encapsulates the many joys and fears of growing up a black woman. The fruit imagery shines throughout, a reference to the sweet and sour aspects of simply Existing While Black, and the reader comes away feeling better for having experienced a soulful, candid ride. 

Kashawn Taylor is a Black, queer, formerly incarcerated writer based in Connecticut. He holds a BA in English and Psychology and an MA in English and creative writing, and is currently an MFA student. His work has appeared recently in such journals as, The Shore Poetry, Querencia Press, Oyster River Pages, Prison Journalism Project, and more. He has work forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Emergent Literary, Union Spring Literary Review, Tufts University's reSentencing Journal, among others. His collection of "prison poetry," subhuman, is forthcoming in March 2025 from Wayfarer Books. Find him on Instagram, @kashawn.writes, or www.kashawntaylor.com.