Identity and Place Echo in Recent South Carolina Poetry Collections

Jo Angela Edwins

Jennifer Bartell, Traveling Mercy (Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2023), 76 pp., paperback $22.99.

Evelyn Berry, Grief Slut (Knoxville, TN: Sundress Publications, 2024), 106 pp., paperback $12.99.

Willie Lee Kinard III, Orders of Service: A Fugue (New Gloucester, ME: Alice James Books, 2023), 100 pp., $18.95.

Len Lawson, Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane (Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2023), 92 pp., $15.00.

Ed Madden, A pooka in Arkansas (Washington, DC: Word Works, 2023), 99 pp., paperback $19.00.

Ed Madden, A Story of the City: Poems Occasional and Otherwise (Columbia, SC: Muddy Ford Press, 2023), 142 pp., $20.00.

Katherine Williams, The Devil Cruises Pacific Coast Highway (American Fork, UT: Kelsay Books, 2023), 112 pp., $23.00.

The year 2023 was anything but lean for poetry in South Carolina. So many books were published by South Carolinians this past year that this reviewer could not cover them all in this essay. Indeed, poetry lovers across the state have an embarrassment of riches to choose from if they wish to spend their free hours reading recent books by poets who call the Palmetto State home. Let us waste no time and begin our tour through recently published collections by six South Carolina poets.

University of South Carolina professor and former Columbia poet laureate Ed Madden, an Arkansas native, published two books of poetry in 2023, the first his Hillary Tham Capital Collection–winning book A pooka in Arkansas. The book’s headnote from W. B. Yeats’s 1888 volume Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry explains that a pooka is an animal spirit who may appear as any number of animals. Fittingly, the first poem in the collection, “When I was a young animal,” describes a youngster growing up in the country, at one with the earth, and with its musks and textures. “On the farm, we Page 196 →were a pack,/the other cubs and me,” the speaker declares, later describing how their mothers checked them for parasites. Later in the collection, “Carnivore” is structured around the images on a tin of animal crackers—bear, lion, tiger, buffalo—and twice in the poem the speaker declares, “Three of them would eat the other.” The poem addresses an important theme in much of the collection, the speaker’s struggle with his identity as a gay man in a family and community that cannot accept his identity: “For a long time I knew nothing/about what men do with men except//it was something I couldn’t—.” But at the end of “Carnivore,” the mature speaker embraces his identity as the most powerful of all the animals in the circus or the zoo: “I am swallowing the animals one by one.”

Another poem that addresses the pain of identity is the title poem, “A pooka in Arkansas,” which describes the speaker walking a country road along the family land as his father lies dying. His mother warns him to be careful as there are “wolves/in the fields,” but he must walk outside to call the man he loves, whom his family “refused to know,/a name they never used.” Ahead of him as he walks, he sees a small dog, itself vulnerable and alone in a wild country. The poem ends on a note that highlights the similarities the speaker sees between the stray dog and himself, caught in hostile territory where even those meant to care for you cannot accept who you are. An interesting parallel poem to “A pooka in Arkansas” is “Fairy tale,” in which the speaker explains, “What you thought was a wolf was not/a wolf. It was your father, mother, brother-/you did not remember what big teeth they had.” The poem goes on to describe a boy groomed to participate in an attack on another boy, suggesting the complexities of victimhood, of guilt and innocence: “The wolf is in the mirror,” the final stanza declares.

A long and powerful prose poem in A pooka in Arkansas, “Burning the fields” also grapples with the death of the speaker’s father and the weight of the haunted landscapes of rural Arkansas. The poem begins with the speaker recalling the organized burning of husks in the fields at the end of the growing season, with a tinge of menace in the memory (one of the poem’s most evocative lines): “A man stands, his head encased by a tiny church—as if the church were a vise, a mask, a hood.” Threaded throughout the poem are ghosts of the past, in the image of abandoned farms, torn-down houses, and the specters of racism and homophobia. Late in the poem, Madden writes, “In 1848, Arkansas changed the penalty for sodomy for blacks. It remained 5–21 years for whites, but it was death for black men, free or slave. In 1873, the racial distinction was removed,” although he does not tell us in favor of which penalty. Much of the poem grapples with the speaker’s confused sense Page 197 →of identity after the death of his father, whom he both felt distanced from and mimics. “I am the son of a man now dead, who carried me low and long like a song sung off tune, then folded like a note into his wallet,” the speaker declares, only to say two stanzas later, “I am the son of a man now dead. I carry him with me like a note in my wallet, wear him like a denim shirt.” His family’s refusal to accept him as a gay man complicates his mourning. The speaker states of his family, “What did they say when people asked after me?” Then he thinks of his mother, “My dad’s gone now. Maybe they don’t ask her anymore.” He understands, however, that silence—so often the code of his family and his homeland—is erasure: “History is a finger on the lips, a hand over a mouth, a collar at the throat.”

Madden’s second book to appear in 2023 was his collection of poems written about Columbia during his time as poet laureate, A Story of the City: Poems Occasional and Otherwise. Some of the poems are, indeed, occasional, written in response to speeches or for events taking place in Columbia during his tenure as poet laureate, whereas others reflect Madden’s responses to regional or national events during a turbulent time in American history. Poems such as “Body politic” blend the two inspirations. Written on the occasion of the January 31, 2017, state of the city address by then-mayor and current presidential advisor Stephen K. Benjamin, the poem begins with reference to the 2017 Women’s March:

When thousands of women with pink hats

and placards fill the streets, think

about how a city handles

bodies, guides them down sidewalks

and streets, between walls of stone

and state, about the way a mass

of bodies is a way of saying

something.

Although the poem begins with an image of protest, it ends with images of unity, of a desire to work together to make the city, the body politic, better:

Our city offers a hand, opens a door.

Our city likes to talk.

Our city would rather build a bridge than build a wall.

Our city wants to hear your story.

Our city leans in to listen.

Page 198 →Several other poems in A Story of the City blend the national and the local, the political and the personal. A good example of such an amalgamation is “Something to declare.” The poem—dated July 11, 2018—begins by acknowledging that the news is focused on the president’s overseas trip while the speaker’s poetry camp students sit at small desks in a chilly classroom and try to write about what it means to live in their present moment. “Sachi talks about what it means/to declare something when you cross a border,” the speaker says, and later, “Zoe describes her story as a scrap of paper swept/by the wind, litter snagged in a tree.” The speaker cannot help but think about his dying cat waiting for him at home. The poem suggests that people with lives and loves and hopes and feelings cannot help but live in a world that leaders—some good, some dreadful, all far removed—can alter with the swipe of a pen. But the people with little power in the world, nevertheless, make their voices heard and use those voices to claim what power they can, as the last stanza illustrates: “This is only a little report from a summer arts camp,/where Makenna and Maya and Eva and Micah are writing/about their small, rich lives. We’re here. You can find us here.” Indeed, much of A Story of the City is about the power of the community and the individuals within it to stand against cruelty, greed, and evil intent.

Current Columbia poet laureate Jennifer Bartell is a native of the Bluefield area of Johnsonville, SC, a community that looms large in her debut collection Traveling Mercy. An African-American community that is home to Bartell’s family and a wider circle of benevolent ancestors, Bluefield functions as both muse and chorus in Bartell’s haunting poems. Bartell took it upon herself to perform an oral history of Bluefield, recording the wisdom and remembered stories of the women who shaped her generation of natives, and the notes to the collection illustrate the depth of the historical research that went into shaping the volume. Bartell’s devotion to Bluefield’s history emerges in the first poem the reader encounters: the collection’s title poem, dedicated to the memory of three of those ancestors, as several of the poems in the collection are dedicated to the poet’s elder guides. Immediately, the poet declares:

The Bluefield Griots plucked

me out of a jar before last breath

of prayer, buried me before birth:

This is how I time travel. I be seed

kept and passed, finger to palm,

planted and preserved for generations.

Page 199 →The poem, as does the entire collection, casts its gaze backward through history. The speaker of “Traveling Mercy” looks back across Jim Crow to the Middle Passage’s nightmare transportation of captured African people across the ocean to slavery in America. As the poem draws to a close, the speaker imagines herself an okra seed in the hair of the “Jonah-woman” who first arrived in South Carolina and planted the seed that grew into the poet: “When fully grown, my yellow flower stretches/into green okra. Points its crooked finger to the sky.”

Many of Bartell’s poems are about such insistent survival, but many are also about loss and grief. One of the most powerful poems in the collection, “When you write your mother’s obituary,” is about exactly what the title says it is, a daunting task that the young Bartell—now a teacher in Richland County—did while working as a news reporter, one who sits in a county council meeting the next day while the thought of the obituary settles itself as “a seedling in your chest.” The poet’s mother, dying of cancer, dictates her final wishes to her daughter, who, after the death, fills out the obituary form and proceeds to “pick the last/dress she will ever wear.” At the poem’s end, the speaker realizes that the mother’s obituary is her innocent self’s “past obituary,” as the seedling in her chest has grown to become a giant oak of grief.

Both the mother and the father of the poet are prominent figures in the book. They are the speaker’s first dear loves and are direct outlets backward to the dearly held ancestors. They are also, of course, the speaker’s literal reason for being. In “The Road to Being Born,” we see the parents at odds after a second son is born, in a difficult labor leading to a caesarean section, over the mother’s wish for a tubal ligation; the father wins the argument. Three years later, when the couple realizes they will give birth to a daughter—the poet—they both agree to have no more children. A few poems later in “Ars Poetica,” the poet celebrates her role as emotional (not literal) truth teller, a role that her birth makes possible:

I am the fisherman’s daughter

with net and oar.

I am the poet

in the mouth of the fish.

I am the seamstress’s daughter

with my needle and thread.

I am the design

in her pattern.

Page 200 →The poet’s birth allows her to tell the stories of her parents and the ancestors before them. She concludes “Ars Poetica” by reminding the reader, “I come with much work/and the light ain’t long.” But the shortness of life does not deter the poet, who concludes the volume with the short poem “The Okra,” which echoes the opening title poem. Here, the speaker declares, “I was grown to be reborn,” carrying with her “[s]eeds inside for next/generation’s harvest.”

Bartell, of course, is not the only writer concerned with history and legacy in her poetry. The latest collection from Newberry College professor and South Carolina native Len Lawson is his book Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane, an engrossing and heartbreaking collection that explores the lives of imagined characters committed to a fictional mental institution, a setting that, nonetheless, reflects the real cruelties inflicted on African-American mental patients in the era of segregation. Lawson dedicates the book to “patients of hospitals for ‘insane Negroes’ from the postbellum era to the mid-20th century” who suffered “mistreatment, racism, and cruelty more disturbing than these patients’ minds were claimed to be.” The collection depicts the lives of fictional men and women committed to the fictional John C. Calhoun Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane, which Lawson imagined to be dedicated at its 1950 opening by then-Governor Strom Thurmond. In the story Lawson’s poems create, the asylum, named after a notorious advocate for slavery and dedicated by a staunch segregationist, is destined to become a site of further cruelties inflicted on African-American South Carolinians. Constructed on a former plantation that was lost by its gambling-addicted owner, the asylum becomes the site of a different sort of imprisonment for the African-American people housed there for decades beyond the Civil War.

Several individual poems tell the tragic stories of various inmates at the asylum. “Birdie” centers on a mother whose boyfriend, the father of her children, resents the children and the expenses they will cause, so Birdie strangles the children, hanging them from trees in a haunting gesture evocative of the horrific lynchings that were inflicted on African Americans throughout American history. “Birdie” is a villanelle, a poetic form that repeats two lines from the first stanza throughout subsequent stanzas, suggesting the cyclical nature of the subject matter, and one such repeated line describes the children as “strange” in a clear echo of the Abel Meeropol song “Strange Fruit,” popularized by singer Billie Holiday in 1939. Lawson knows his cultural history, and the poems in this volume reflect those histories to provide context for the tragic events the collection describes.

Page 201 →“Ballad of Milton and Julia” uses the traditional ballad form and its common subject of doomed love to explain Milton’s fifteen-year confinement to the asylum. Milton, unable to impregnate his beloved Julia, comes home early from work one day to discover a young minister named Stevenson in bed with his wife. Milton throws the minister from the room and castrates him with a boxcutter. It is Stevenson who convinces the state to commit Milton to the asylum instead of sentencing him to life in prison, a fate that the poem acknowledges may not have been a mercy:

He would’ve preferred the chair and would have

settled for the cell instead of seeing Stevenson

once a week in front of his Calhoun chamber door

begging for forgiveness and praying for their souls.

When, at last, Milton is released after fifteen years, he returns home to an empty house overtaken by snakes and rats, Julia having moved North to have children by two different fathers. The implication of betrayal haunting Milton is clear, as the line between wrongdoer and wronged in this poem is difficult to draw.

The central figure in Lawson’s book and in the asylum is an inmate named Brock Bridges, who becomes a kind of folk hero to the other inmates. A gentle soul who loved butterflies and was committed after urinating on a woman who startled him in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot, Bridges gets a reputation after an orderly beats him up and Bridges retaliates by biting the orderly’s neck so hard that he kills him. Bridges is treated, or punished, with electroshock therapy. In the poem “Shock Therapy,” an employee of the asylum describes witnessing the treatment:

Brock Bridges lay on a medical bedtwo nurses held him down one at the headone at the footPushing my mop bucket past the cracked door sometimes I saw him vibrating in bedElectric current flowing through that black bodyunder white sheets.

Much later in the collection, when Brock escapes the burning asylum, people speculate that he was the arsonist, though readers discover that the speculation is false. Still, Bridges—disappearing in the midst of the destruction of the infamous asylum—achieves hero status in his ability to survive and gain freedom after years of suffering at the hands of those meant to offer healing. Page 202 →Indeed, Lawson’s collection suggests that healing is never possible unless words are given to the truth and responsibility is taken for treating people inhumanely. Although the first goal might be accomplished poetically, much is yet to be done in our state and our culture to accomplish the second.

If Lawson’s book shows how fictional scenarios echo lived history, Katherine Williams’s The Devil Cruises Pacific Coast Highway shows how real life can take leaps into the fantastic. Williams, a native southerner who has lived in California and Virginia and currently resides in James Island, SC, pulls actual landscapes from across the world into her poems, some of which throb with the enchanting madness of a fever dream. The collection features poems in free verse and in a variety of forms—prose poems, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, sestinas—all of which foreground Williams’s luminous technical prowess. Many of the poems showcase sound brilliantly, and many resonate with multiple voices that create a kind of choral effect on the reader’s/listener’s ear. “The Summer of Nothing Moves” is a series of unrhymed tercets narrated by a speaker whose twelve-year-old niece is visiting for the summer, and the preteen’s excited voice bursts through the first two stanzas, begging for permission to explore her precocious desires. Her pleas set a tone for a whirlwind summer that becomes an exercise in breathless motion. As is often the case in Williams’s poems, there is a lovely musicality to the flow of the lines. After a tire blows on a trip to the Grand Canyon and the aunt teaches the niece how to put on a spare, the poem concludes, “Tires intact so far, we push through acetylene heat out to the edge,/park the sedan, sit on a stone. Nothing moves before this great gash/in the Earth but the slow turning universe, our breathing bodies.”

But it isn’t just sound that weaves through Williams’s verse, as these poems shimmer with color. Consider these gemlike images: “Men and maids upholstered in teal” (“Epithalamion”); “if i am a lunatic spelling the walls purple/then you are veins of garnet in a virgin rock-bed” (“Orthodoxy”); “Let your grimy little street’s smoggy days/turn cerulean, and your moonless nights’/wild auroras burn green and purple” (“Blueaille”); “Red jaguar plays tug-o’-war with a purple lamb./Chartreuse gargoyle grooms yellow jackalope./Dragons witness their orangeness cast into the earth” (“On the Wing”). Still, of the kaleidoscope of hues featured in this collection, the dominant color is red, as is evidenced even just in the titles of poems such as “Red Side Blues,” “The Red Terrance,” and “Ode on Red.” It’s no accident either that blood as an image pulses throughout the collection. This adoration of scarlets is perhaps a reflection of the titular devil, who, in the book’s title poem, fiddles with the radio in his ‘59 Chevy convertible while cruising Page 203 →the streets to find a woman to snatch and offer to share with God, to whom he declares, “I’d be glad to pick up/a little blood on the way over. Amen” (“The Devil Cruises PCH”). In “God Devil Ghazal,” Satan mends fences with God before they attempt a world tour together, but God bores Lucifer with his tameness until they both agree to part ways once again.

Clearly, Williams’s poetic toolbox is filled with dark humor, much of which, like the action in many of these poems, travels at the speed of light. Her ars poetica, “Termite Art,” is a Shakespearean sonnet that features the muse as a drunken gangster/femme fatale forcing the poet to write at gunpoint. “Sonnet Comparing David Lehmans” is patterned after W. H. Auden’s “In the Time of War, XII” and is written as a response to poet David Lehman’s declaration that a bouts-rimés using the rhymes of any Auden sonnet would make a “great poem.” The speaker of the bouts-rimés—landlady? lover?—discovers that the poet living under her roof has been running up the phone bill by calling phone sex lines. Subtle or direct or a little sad, the humor in Williams’s poems is almost always there.

It should be noted that, as several poems already mentioned illustrate, many of the pieces in this collection highlight women’s experience in varying degrees of humor and sadness. “San Quintín Harbor” beautifully describes—mostly from the woman’s perspective—a couple in a strained relationship camping on a beach and speaking to each other of anything but their troubles. Two poems along, “Amicable Pre-Hearing Brunch” appears to feature the same couple comparing the restaurant dishware in front of them to memories of their almost-dead marriage (including the trip to San Quintín). “After Many Years Out West,” a sonnet that may be the most linear narrative poem in the collection, describes a convenience store clerk’s silent recognition of a boy she dated thirty-three years after the fact, in the face of a married and evidently well-off customer. She recalls herself as “the buoyant, licentious,/unwanted teen” and recalls him as afflicted with “the madonna/whore thing.” Women—especially women’s struggles with men, even if ironically distanced in narration—are a central theme of Williams’s collection.

In a much different way, gender is at the center of Aiken County native Evelyn Berry’s Grief Slut. In a collection that appeared just as 2023 was rolling into 2024, Berry, a transgender writer and editor now living in Columbia, examines the challenge and the beauty involved in growing up queer in the South. One of Berry’s most shining talents is her ability to use the music of language to portray sensuality in everything—from sex to prayer, to computer coding, to mowing grass on a hot day—and it should be noted that Page 204 →anyone who has seen Berry perform her work at readings cannot help but hear the poems spoken in her lively voice. The opening poem of Part One, “queer the smear,” is a poem whose title is created by inverting the homophobic name of playground football. It demonstrates well the sensual musicality and double entendre of Berry’s poetry:

behind

the school,

we scrum.

we bum rush.

we hum

the slur,

sing

for brief

carnage.

The poem’s conclusion underscores the irony behind the homophobic name of an often homoerotic game:

there is no other way

boys may touch,

may hold each other

against the dirt.

Indeed, sensuality pervades in Berry’s poetry, although what is sensed is not always pleasurable. As the title of the collection indicates, many of Berry’s poems emerge from a common poetic wellspring, the poet’s response to the agonies of grief. Berry tells us in the notes to her book that the “you” of many of the poems is her friend Abe, who committed suicide in 2020. Part Three of the four-part volume is dedicated to Abe, and several poems in the section are saturated with memories of the poet’s lost friend. In the prose poem “coronation,” the speaker recalls a visit to a Burger King with her friend on his thirtieth birthday, when he asks for a cardboard crown to wear, and for the rest of the night, the friends share the crown, growing soggy with their sweat. Months later, when the speaker unearths the tattered crown behind a bookcase after the friend’s death, the memento triggers the speaker’s grief again. In the poignant “ritual for remembering that one night you were still alive,” the speaker uses a particularly acute image to illustrate Page 205 →the distortion that memory makes of a lost loved one’s particularity: “a photograph deteriorates the more often it is touched.” The challenge all poets face when writing about grief is how to translate the ineffable—love and loss—into words, something Berry addresses in “elegy,” when she exclaims, “what is the use of words/if they only feed grief’s appetite,/the use of any of this if I cannot keep you alive?” Berry’s poems push us to acute feeling, whether that feeling is pleasure and joy or heartache and grief.

Another source of grief in Berry’s book is the sadness evoked by hate crimes against the community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual/aromantic/agender individuals. In two poems titled “martyrdom of saint sebastian,” the saint—whom, Berry explains in her notes, is “often revered as the gay saint”—suffers the kind of death too many queer people still suffer at the hands of the hateful, a reality emphasized in the second of these two poems, in which the saint’s martyrdom is directly compared with the killing of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998. The powerful “controlled burn” describes a series of fires, including two arsons—the deadly 1973 burning of the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans and a 2011 arson that killed two gay men in their Dallas apartment. In “on the question, ‘wait, can trans women reclaim the word faggot?’” Berry explains that the origin of the epithet is the bundles of twigs “used in fires, which refers/to queer bodies used as/kindling.” But although Berry gives powerful voice to the experience of the queer community facing life-threatening cruelties in a society still plagued by homophobia, Grief Slut does not portray only notes of sadness and horror. In “boyhood: revisions,” Berry pays honor to her dead name and the life she lived as Derek, declaring, “i swear, i do not want to forget,” and she explains in her notes to the poems that she does not want to “create a veil of shame around a name I used for the majority of my life, a past version of myself with whom I would like to cultivate a relationship of care and compassion.” The final poem of the collection, “yes, i’ve seen the future & i promise i’m still alive,” expresses the mixed emotions of living trans in such a culture but includes triumphant notes, as Berry declares:

i am translated

most simply

as constellation

cluster of stars

with a name

i’ve chosen myself.

Page 206 →Another poet whose work captures queer experience is Newberry native Willie Lee Kinard III, whose Orders of Service won the prestigious Alice James Award in 2022. Visually engaging, as might be expected from a poet who doubles as a graphic designer, the collection features some poems in traditional black print on a white background, some in white print on a black background, and several poems whose power derives in part from the shape of the poem on the page. The voices in the poems explore what it is like to be Black and queer and raised in the Christian South. The poems are complex works of art, which accounts for the collection’s subtitle, “A Fugue.” Kinard III writes poetry ripe with allusion, incorporating references from Greek mythology (such as Icarus, Adonis, the Minotaur, and the Gorgons), popular music (Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Sam Cooke, SWV, and the Bee Gees), the Bible (Daniel, Jesus, and Pilate) and the animal kingdom (bees, crickets, and fish). Any single poem in the collection is packed with resonance, no doubt one of the reasons Kinard III labels their table of contents “epyllia,” a series of narrative poems that carry the weight of epic in shorter form. Still, despite the rich diversity of metaphor and subject matter in the collection, a particularly important theme throughout is individual identity, including Kinard III’s place in a family in which they share a name with male ancestors whose actions and attitudes do not always reflect the poet’s. This is most evident in the poem “Labyrinth,” in which Kinard III is figured as a Minotaur shackled by their own name, described as a “corn maze.” The poet declares, “I will call my irons/Suffix,” and later insists, “This yoke ain’t easy. I pull my father/behind me, slosh through stubborn puddles/of his absence.” It is clear in this collection that the father’s failures become a harder burden to bear when the child carries his name: “I will be frank:/it is exhaustive. Willie is usually diminutive.” Later in the collection, “Frostbite” depicts the anger of a child disciplined and criticized by an often absent father who does not bother to support his family enough to keep them out of the cold, literally and figuratively.

Another aspect of family identity important in the collection is Black identity and the burden of legacies of slavery and racism in the South, as is most clearly illustrated in “When My Family Says We Were the Regulars There.” The poem describes the often unspoken intersections between descendants of the enslavers and the enslaved, including “the name of their family the name of our family stretching the span/of this place’s origins & everybody knows it.” The poem calls out what is often unsayable in a still racially divided South: “my mother/likely knew our enslavers, in our neck of the woods, one does/their best by not reminding them of it.” Indeed, many Page 207 →of the poems in Kinard III’s collection attempt to speak truths people often try to keep quiet for a variety of reasons.

One recurring poem in the collection that uses graying-out of text to speak such hidden truths is “Automation,” whose various iterations have different subtitles. The poem’s first appearance, titled “Automation: Flight or Exit Interview with Holy Woman,” is structured in a question-and-answer format, with italicized questions aimed at the audience’s psychology—for example, “If you trying to escape so bad, why you keep moving the same way?” and “How long it’s been since you last made stars with your smile?”—and the “answers,” which appear to be excerpts from an explanation of the sexual roles of queen bees. Later iterations of the poem gray out text that is not meant to be read, to create erasure poems out of the original, until the final poem, “Automation: I,” leaves to be read only one question and two small words as an answer. The poem “shrinks” as it goes along, suggesting that the answers to questions of identity, perhaps especially queer identity, cannot easily be answered, even with an elaborate natural metaphor.

Of course, as “Automation” alludes, a major issue of identity at work in the collection is queer identity, and several poems give voice to their speakers’ search for love and understanding in a confusing and often hostile world. “Return Policy” is a beautiful erotic poem set among the trappings of a luscious breakfast. The various “Hymn” poems in the collection reflect the experience of online dating in queer communities; for example, “Hymn: Chainsweat” is a raucously sensual depiction of online hook-up culture in which the speaker describes Summer, “the most glorious cicada,” about whom is declared, “I haven’t wanted to be someone else’s as much as I do now.” Arguably, the most epic of the epyllia in Kinard III’s collection, “How Deep Is Your Love” is a twenty-eight-sectioned centerpiece that, according to the poet’s notes, “alludes to the myths (& deaths) of Icarus & Adonis in an attempt to explode or dissect the sonnet.” Indeed, Icarus and Adonis bleed through this poem, but one additional influence that Kinard III does not mention in their notes appears to be Walt Whitman, as “How Deep Is Your Love” contains echoes of Whitman’s epic “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Birds—a robin, a lark, a thrush—become prominent figures in the poem, as they lift the boy to the sky (Icarus, yes, but also the poet born of his encounter with the birds?), only to drop him into the sea, which is held by a yard bathed in heat that claims the birds, as the boy “eats the sea” and “joins the birds.” In time, the speaker finds his lover dead but does not wish to admit it: “Give me another word than that./I will not call him dead.” Like the mockingbird in Whitman’s poem whose mate will not answer him, the Page 208 →speaker’s lover does not respond to his calls: ”He will not call back./There is nothing left to answer to.” The speaker/poet declares in section twenty-seven, “There is nothing left to sing about./There is nothing to brag about,” but being a poet, the speaker cannot go silent, instead returning in the final section twenty-eight to demand, “Give me another word.” “How Deep Is Your Love,” like the whole of Kinard III’s collection, is a complex hymn to love, loss, and the difficulties of being a poet/singer whose identities the world often refuses to embrace.

Every so often, as happened most recently in late 2022 in a much-maligned New York Times opinion piece, someone insists that poetry is dead. Don’t believe it. Anyone who says so does not read much contemporary poetry, which expresses ideas and emotions in richer diversity today than ever before. And if any South Carolina readers of such poppycock are inclined to believe those lamentations, they need only turn to the “South Carolina Authors” bookshelves of their local bookstore to see that, indeed, poetry is alive and well, waiting for readers to let the poems sing in their ears.

Jo Angela Edwins is professor of English and Trustees’ Research Scholar at Francis Marion University. A widely published poet, she currently serves as the poet laureate of the Pee Dee. Her recent collection, A Dangerous Heaven, was published in 2023.