The Big Book of Exit Strategies
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Publisher Description
Praise for Jamaal May:
"Linguistically acrobatic [and] beautifully crafted. . . . [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel."—Publishers Weekly
Following Jamaal May's award-winning debut collection, Hum (2013), these new poems explore parallel landscapes of the poet's interior and an insidious American condition. Using dark humor that helps illuminate the pains of maturity and loss of imagination, May uncovers language like a skilled architect—digging up bones of the past to expose what lies beneath the surface of the fragile human condition.
From: "Ask Where I've Been":
Ask about the tornado of fists.
The blows landed. If you can
watch it all—the spit and blood frozen
against snow, you can probably tell
I am the too-narrow road winding out
of a crooked city built of laughter,
abandon, feathers and drums.
Ask only if you can watch streetlights bow,
bridges arc, and power lines sag,
and still believe what matters most
is not where I bend
but where I am growing.
Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, the Believer, NER, and the Kenyon Review. May has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
May follows his brilliant debut, Hum, with poems that are at once an extended ode to his hometown, Detroit, and a resounding protest against the many violent and oppressive ills that plague America, including gun violence and racism. The poems soar when May finds their center and grounds them in lived experience, revealing his genius for reframing old concepts into new images: "Coming black/ into the deep south,/ my friend says,/ is like returning/ to an elegant home/ you were beat in/ as a child." Similarly, when May lets his subconscious roam, each line seems to turn the next like a skeleton key opening an endless hallway of doors: "I am trying to say/ the neighborhood is as tattered/ and feathered as anything else,/ as shadow pierced by sun/ and light parted/ by shadow-dance as anything else." Yet given the ambitious nature of the work, it's an uneven read. Some heavy subjects, such as war, are approached with grand metaphors instead of hard-hitting, grounded images. Other poems seem too overt in their intellectual or humorous intentions to maintain an element of surprise. These are presumably the growing pains of an excellent young poet treading unfamiliar ground, and like the Detroit that May describes, these poems are full of both shadow and light.
