The Blog

The essay below is the result of an ongoing contemplation about whether, as a poet of color, I have a special obligation to write "political poems" or to engage, through my poetry, in the national debate on race. In my student days, I didn't want to write "identity" poems or be known as "the black poet with a social message." If you'd asked me at the time, I would've said something like, "I'm not a political poet, I just want to write good poems"...as if those concepts are mutually exclusive. It has taken me many years, and a lot of study, to realize that compelling language and a politically engaged sensibility can coexist in the same poem. And, more precisely: that I can write a poem that addresses race in those terms.

When I saw Lacy Johnson read from her new memoir, she came right out with it. “No one says what this book is about,” she said. Then she told us.

The Other Side (Tin House Books, 2014) is about the day that Lacy’s ex-boyfriend kidnapped her and took her to a soundproof room he had built for the sole purpose of raping and killing her. He raped her and then left briefly to create an alibi for that night. He told her that when he returned, “I’ll shoot you in the cunt and then the head.”