Book Review

Dripping with water and blood, bursting with song and mourning, dancing with ancestral and future bones, To Be Named Something Else moved me in entirely new ways. Immediately, I proceeded to read it again. I needed to know how she did it. How did every poem grip me, tip me, thrill me, spill me?

What I found was a repetition of words and forms that are constantly in conversation with the other poems in the book, and with other artists like Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Ocean Vuong. As Phenix says in an interview with Frontier Poetry, she is “engaging lineages.”

Name, mouth, bone, water and blood appear alone, or more often together, in all but three poems. These words create a living body. It is a body giving birth, examining the speech of gentrification, getting her eyebrows threaded, having a miscarriage, scrubbing blood off the sidewalk, checking her reflection in the mirror, dancing drunk with friends in Miami. Here is life in all its complexities and contradictions. The body is in constant contact with others. The words imagine, remember, and create lineages.

The Poem “Family Pathology” imagines a daughter falling into her mother’s unsteady footsteps. The words mouth and bone are central to the images and serve to reinforce the mother/daughter lineage:

My mother is small-mouthed

and ready-boned beneath a lost boy

My mother is fifteen and         an exit.

Later in the poem, the daughter is:

ready-boned under a lost boy.                                    Then,

            I am small-mouthed and         an exit, too—.

“Small-mouthed” gives the sense that they are not ready to speak for themselves, the mouths not yet fully grown. “Ready-boned” seems a resignation for what is to come, as opposed to sexual excitement. And they are both—not people, but exits for the embryos that will form.

This poem is linked to a later poem, “Family Pathology with Alternate Universe.” This later poem uses “mouth” and “blood” to imagine the same situation but with female power:

My mother

                                                                        siren mouthed and hair

                                                                                                around her scalp like a fire.

While the daughter states:

I have

                        a small breath born of my blood. Say to the breath,

      I love you.

“I have small breath born of my blood” is repeated as the last line of the poem. The small breath is a pregnancy, and this time the mother has a full mouth that speaks to her child. “Mouth” and “blood,” even as imaginings, express the power of lineages—mother to daughter to granddaughter.

We see lineages again in “Almost Ode,” which uses “water” and “names” to express the grief of miscarriage and, perhaps surprisingly, its legacy of lineage:

  each time you are

  a dream and I am an ocean

  of if.

I name your almost                 many times                  a fuller poem than the last […]

And I               call you by the almost name              Kendi Akai Elizabeth Carter.

The water is universal as ocean but also, as the “ocean” of the speaker’s womb, intensely personal. The name and water here do not last, but they are still a part of the speaker’s lineage:

To say  I—       your almost,                would amass a world              in which you are

a palm             for tracing with my fingers      if given the chance.                 To say

that I know God                                  best because of your perhaps.

Though the ocean is emptied and the child is gone, their connection lives on through God. For the speaker, this lineage is traced back to its source.

In “Nanna Says, Lord Have Mercy Jesus,” naming and lineages are profound in an entirely joyful way: “And to be named something else is to be named / alive and possible—fulfilled ancestral aspiration.” What could be more important, more sacred than that? In nearly every poem, name, mouth, bone, water and blood hold the power of lineage.

Phenix also uses the lineages of formal poetry to connect with writers past and present. She writes in the ode, villanelle, sonnet, elegy, aubade, pantoum, ghazal, shape poem, ars poetica, prose poem, cento, choreopoem, list poem, definition poem, zuihitsu, burning haibun, duplex, and nested arroyo.

The older forms she uses are not corseted into their familiar iambic pentameter. Phenix’s rhythms rise and dip to their own beat. In “Sonnet While Black,” Phenix writes many trochaic lines. Trochaic is the opposite of iambic meter. There is a long lineage of Black poets using trochaic meters as a refusal to conform to White standards of poetry and to resist the white supremacy and misogyny so often contained in such poetry. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks are just a few examples of such poets.

The last two lines of “Mothafuckin Sonnet” can be read as a direct conversation with the lineage of the sonnet, of iambic pentameter, and of white supremacy:

been beat, bullet-holed, buried. Like we too aint been ab & ab & ab & ab—ten fold(?)

Who is counting?        Thank you, thank you             when we are        a  lesser math.

She evokes the sonnet’s rhyme and iambic pentameter while the last line is written in trochaic meter and has 11 stressed syllables as opposed to the ten of iambic pentameter. The extra foot? “Who is counting?” Phenix harnesses the cresting power of the sonnet and connects it to her own Black poetic lineage. But this poem, indeed its title alone, is entirely contemporary. Phenix creates something personal and richly formal. She dares anyone to call it “a lesser math.” She makes the sonnet and all the forms her own with layered images, striking voices, and precise location.

Harlem is in Phenix’s poems the way Bronzeville is in Brooks’ poems. Lineage is found in all these poems through place—of girl to woman, of mother to daughter, of grandmother to God…all within the 45 blocks of Harlem. The poems are that specific and that profound.

To Be Named Something Else reaches to the past and calls to the present. It is “alive and possible.” More and more poets are using form in inventive ways and creating their own, but Phenix stretches forms and repetition, demanding our attention to each word, packing them full with sound, image, and memory. Among the many contemporary formalists I have read—Patricia Smith, Marilyn Hacker, Annie Finch, Jenna Lê, Chad Abushanab, and Alexis Sears, to name a few—this is form like I have never experienced. Winning first place of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize hardly seems enough. This book changes the game.