The pain and anger sparked by police violence have inspired many rap songs and protest chants. Poetry composed on a page and published in a book might seem a less promising format to approach this troubling subject, but St. Louis native Jabari Asim shows it can be done and done well in Stop and Frisk: American Poems, his new collection of 35 poems published by Bloomsday Literary.
This book is haunted by the victims of police violence whose names become better known every day. Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky calls these poems “documentary,” and they are that. Some poems are literally documentary, pieced together from comments posted on police discussion boards. Many refer to a notorious video document of police violence that went viral. One poem is composed of nothing but the names of such victims.
The poetry is very contemporary and is published at just the right time. Michael Brown gets his own poem. The Ferguson unrest gets another, told from the point of view of a CNN reporter on the street. But Asim has a longer memory than your average Twitter thread. Abner Louima, sexually abused by New York police in the almost distant past of 1997, is remembered in one poem. The routine vigilante rape of Black women during American slavery is remembered with quiet horror in another.
Quiet horror, in fact, describes the tone of the entire collection. The poet does not dramatize and certainly does not glamorize violence. Police violence is simply accepted as a fact of Black life and, as such, an appropriate topic for Black poetry. The commonplace character of such violence adds to the horror as one turns the pages of this slim book and is disturbed by how familiar all this pain and death has become.
Asim writes very simply. These poems can be understood by anyone who can read the English language and could be taught at almost any level by the properly daring teacher. He cites Black poets – Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes – who wrote simply. But this work is far from simplistic.
Though Asim is not showy, he attempts formal experiments throughout the collection. One poem is written as a glossary of terms derived from police violence. He adopts dramatic form in several poems. He redacts lines in one poem like a police report being made public. His poem for Michael Brown mashes up the words “man,” “heat” and “cop,” making a mess on the page suggestive of the act of violence at the center of the poem.
As the title suggests, police abuse is the dominant subject of this collection, but the poet glances at other acts of violence and other facets of Black life. We encounter the “collateral” deaths of Black youth who kill each other. The loose cigarettes (“loosies”) made notorious by the police killing of Eric Garner are appreciated for their own power to shorten lives.
This is not a book anyone is likely to read to feel good, but the beauty of Black music and dance flits through the poems, like the warm memories of the good moments in days that end horribly. The last line of the book is “Deep thrum of bass,” suggesting that life and its comforting rhythms go on despite all the pain and loss. But the line before it – “Wreck and ruin” – is what you need to brace yourself for before you go reading Stop and Frisk.
Left Bank Books will host Jabari Asim for a discussion of Stop and Frisk: American Poems, on its Facebook page, at 7 p.m. CDT on Tuesday, August 18.
