Book Review: Point Blank

Thiago Zanutigh

Point Blank: Poems by Alan King, Silver Birch Press, 2018, $15 paperback

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

Alan King’s new poetry collection begins with “Hulk” in which the poet walks the streets at night growing into something superhuman. The poet is a black man and knows that in America, fear and suspicion are projected on him at all times, especially at night. “White people look at me / and pretend they don’t see / the breeding of slaves, / pretend not to know / why I hulk around / with anger and grief / swelling my biceps and thighs.” It’s an apt conceit, becoming the Hulk in the face of racism. “All I remember was how / the trees shrank in my shadow.”

The poet’s alienation from his own humanity smolders throughout Point Blank. In “X-Men,” he writes, “Sometimes I wonder / if you have to be an acrobat / to survive America.” In “Brink,” the poet is a “cockroach / in the kitchen, a grease spot on / a white wall, a rat in the dining room.” The poet must fight for his humanity, and fight he does.

King hails from Maryland, the son of immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago. He’s a Cave Canem fellow and Best of the Net nominee. His poems face the world head-on, grappling with racism, police brutality, and other issues facing the black community. As dire as his subject matter can be, King infuses his verse with sensuous descriptions of women and men and food and fond memories of his childhood. His is a sumptuous sensibility that, paradoxically, can deliver a breakneck prosody when needed. His lines spin and sizzle, thicken and thin with raw energy, replete with the sensations of being human, all the things no one can take away. “I did write a poem once about mouth-shaped orchids / and their aromatic kisses,” the poet declaims in “Sure, You Can Ask Me about Hip Hop,” a poem that turns stereotypes on their head. “Never wrote a love song to a firearm,” he says. “I did write a love poem for an aunt I lost to cancer.”

The world in Point Blank can be dangerous and forlorn. “The club air / was kerosene.” “Somewhere, sirens wail like horn-mouth babies.” But it’s a world held together by something vital in the poet, a way of holding one’s own in the heart and in the head. Poetry is meant to redeem experience, to reaffirm one’s humanity, and King delivers the goods.