The Brooklyn Rail

The opening line of Patricia Spears Jones’s elegy for Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet and journalist Claribel Alegría, who died in 2018, envisions a poet who “marked her days with rage & love.” Alegría is thus a model for Spears Jones’s fifth collection, The Beloved Community, which is similarly animated by such “rage and love,” as the poet navigates with grace and grief the “blood, blame, and curses” (“Fred Hampton Born This Day”) of American history and its impacts, both nationally and personally felt, in the present day. In doing so, or in order to do so, The Beloved Community encompasses an abundance of places and spaces, across time and across the country, including the launderettes and delis and “streets paved with grime and magic” of Brooklyn (“Fortune’s Wheel”); “late ’60s, early ’70s Nueva York” (“Oh, that Brazilian Guy”); the Tompkins Square Park side of Avenue A in Manhattan; “the rails away away away from Dixie Land” (“Lave”); a late-night CVS pharmacy in Virginia; a friend’s home in Boston; “the Great Migration’s circles of motion” (“Crying in Cassis for The Queen of Soul—Aretha Franklin dead at 76”); the birthplace of Fred Hampton; Atlanta as it was riven by the mass murder of children in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and even what Spears Jones calls “ghost country,” in a poem of the same name, seemingly the opposite—or the loss of—her “beloved community.”

As she moves through space and place, Spears Jones tangles with trauma both specific and abstracted, large-scale and local, with an American “ecology of fear” (“Trophic Cascade”), and with a more generalized yet closely held understanding of the various ways in which “danger abides … Anxiety abides” (“Thanksgiving/Boston 2013”). Holding “American geology” to be fundamentally “harrowing,” as she writes in “Poverty,” The Beloved Community traces the processes by which the nation, and her existence within it, have been formed. There are poems about the poverty that shapes her immediate neighborhood, and associated questions there around belonging, citizenship, and care; about migration, both geographical (“the menwomenchildren / stumbling into an American haze” [“an American haze”]) and across the color line (“How many / Walked away from their mothers, sisters, cousins / Passed into another land, just to have an ordinary life” [“Dolly Parton, EmmyLou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt sing ‘Telling Me Lies’”]); and about white supremacy, police violence, “years of misrule, disruption, murder” (“Defiant”), and being “Black in a world tilted White” (“Fred Hampton Born This Day”). And there are poems about the personal anguish—the “expected sadness / And then unexpected torments” (“‘The pace of ferocity’”)—that accompanies the experience of growing old: the gathering loss of loved ones and the accumulating yet never-dulled “new grief” (“The Beloved Community”) that accompanies such losses, the threat of illness and death (not least in the context of a global pandemic), and “the loss of parts beautiful” (“The Poem at Sea”). “Over decades of growing into fullness,” Spears Jones writes in “Thanksgiving/Boston 2013,” “our years become that / Precarious blossom that falls onto earth and decays.” The “Secret Psychic” on Mermaid Avenue need not “tell us about death,” we read in “Mermaid and Surf,” because it “is everywhere.”

But for all the trauma, love more than rage wins out: this is a collection about kinship and the forms it takes, even after death, as well as about Spears Jones’s belief in the power of poetry to articulate and embody such kinship. The collection is prefaced by “Lave,” a lyric reflection on Jacob Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” (1940–41), in which Spears Jones ponders the notion, put forward in the caption to Panel 57, that “one of the last groups to leave the South,” was “the female worker.” “One woman is her own group?” Spears Jones wonders, before proceeding to offer up her own rich subjectivity as she enacts and explores this idea throughout The Beloved Community. She walks, watches, feels, and remembers with a disarming openness and commitment to a literary style that, to borrow Urayoán Noel’s description of Nuyorican poetics, renders “directly and uncompromisingly a lived experience, with its concomitant psychic debris.”¹

Spears Jones makes clear that she isn’t just “her own group,” however—or at least that “her own group” is porous enough to accommodate a multitude of others. The collection’s epigraph is a line from Lorenzo Thomas’s “Discovering America Again”—“someone has walked this way before.” The Beloved Community bears this out. It is a work of discovery and rediscovery, guided by those who have gone before, by “a communion of poor, enraged and seeking new ways to open doors” (“Fred Hampton Born This Day”). The extraordinary image of people as “living lakes sloshing against other bodies” (“The Poem at Sea”) encapsulates Spears Jones’s deployment (in the lineage of Frank O’Hara) of a dazzling meshwork of the names of friends and influences, collaborators and dedicatees (often all of the above). The poet’s mapmakers include Thomas and Lawrence, as well as Hélio Oiticica, Tom Dent, Betye Saar, Ada Limón, Lynda Hull, Papo Colo, Pamela Uschuk, Hannah Weiner, Fred Hampton, Hsi Muren, Lee Breuer, Steve Cannon, Meena Alexander, Anselm Berrigan, Marilyn Kallet, Celia Cruz, Geri Allen, and Aretha Franklin. Like the “spiders” who “spread their cosmic maps, unreadable to all but / The other spiders” (“Betye Saar’s Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress”), these writers, artists, activists, and friends offer guidance, solace, and beauty amid chaos, not least when manifested in Spears Jones’s writing, so that “light remains lit no matter the brambles” (“Lee Breuer dies and I clean my stovetop”).

“How to value a dispersal of self, a body dissolved” (“The skin of the thing”); how to resist the ways in which “Repeating news of police violence / beats back poetry” (“Speaking Sparks”)—these are the questions The Beloved Community asks. The answer is boldly asserted in the collection’s concluding lines: “Our words need air. / To survive. Sisters, / we mean to speak.” In this speakerly text, which reaches at every turn beyond the written lyric in order to be heard as well as read, it is clear that “Voice is our greatest magic” (“Comedy with Flutes”). As Spears Jones writes about Aretha Franklin, “Voice travels across hearts’ doors” (“Crying in Cassis”).

1. Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 47.