by Nancy Woo
June 27, 2023
Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, writer, organizer, and climate activist who harbors a wild love for the natural world. Her debut poetry collection is called I’d Rather Be Lightning (GASHER Press, March 2023). Nancy has received fellowships from Artists at Work, PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Her work has been published in The Shore, Tupelo Quarterly, Stirring, Radar Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Nancy has an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University and a BA in sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Find her cavorting around Long Beach (Tongva land) in California, and online at nancylyneewoo.com or @fancifulnance on social.
Negative Money by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram; Catapult; 112 pgs.; $14.95
In Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s masterful fourth collection, Negative Money, we encounter a wide range of poetic stretches, from the syntactically disruptive to the academically metacognitive to the playfully visual. This array of poetic voices reveals a complexity of identity as the book progresses. The jump from form to form is a thrilling and somewhat disorienting view of Lillian’s multi-faceted view of themselves, as they invite the reader into the experience of “seeing themselves as seen by others,” and the inescapable reality of being a Black body in a “raced, gendered, & sexualized public space.”
Lillian (as they name themselves) puts on blast many problematic aspects of American society, where there’s “nothing innocent / about the fallen leaves.” They reveal private racist encounters with white men, including a professor and a barber. It becomes obvious how Lillian’s mistrust of the (white) academic institutions is well-founded, when a white professor (an authority figure) confides in them that a Black senator is “so (for one of them) articulate,” exposing his underlying racist assumption that Black people are inarticulate. Considering Lillian’s skillful execution of language, this particular point becomes highly ironic as we proceed through the collection.
Short essays with white text on a black background punctuate the verse as distinctly different from the poems. They are written in an academic vernacular that investigates and analyzes Lillian’s own poems that we just read. These essays are written as if from a third-person, objective, academic lens, which creates a feeling of otherness, as if Lillian is being observed from the outside, though it is themselves doing the observing of the observation itself. The juxtaposition of these essays compared to the rest of the poems, some of which are visual, is highly effective in crafting an ambidextrous voice. Lillian performs a sense of viewing that abstracts their Black experience, while at the same time expressing that “their Black body is both fleshy material, which exists in the material world, & social construct.” This exercise might demonstrate that using inert, collegiate language about Black bodies can be dehumanizing, drawing out the implicit racism in mostly white academic institutions. At the very least, there is a clear sense that white academics do not share the experience of “Black on / Black off,” or that white men do not feel the need to adapt themselves to different social situations the way Black people do.
The close proximity of the deeply felt microaggressions that they encounter with white men and the distanced scholarly language folds us into a fractured sense of double consciousness. In one essay, Lillian writes, “Lillian is naively trying to achieve an escape from history and time,” implying that no level of detached analysis can change the material reality of being a Black body in a mostly white environment. The presence of “male mania and colonization” is the backdrop for Lillian’s experiences as a “Black body that is constructed within the social.” The intermittent essays provide rich intellectual fodder for imagining the “Black body [as] a space of possibility.” With the repetition of the phrase “Black body” throughout these essays, the reader is reminded again and again that the active and observant mind doing the writing is situated within a Black body that exists in a real historic time and place—which carries the weight of implicit or explicit physical and psychic danger to the speaker because of white supremacy.
This includes the sexualization of their Black body by white men; we see instances of implied misconduct occurring throughout the book, rendered in the line “White men are the end of a black woman’s youth,” indicating an unsavory sexual power dynamic . In the poem, “Lust Money,” we encounter the lines “That slick monster sat down with us all,” followed by “He imagines me forward, / then bent, as in over,” perhaps implying inappropriate sexual advances made by that white professor or someone in a similar position. The phrases “mouth-first,” “thirst soup,” and “unbuttoning” paint a visceral picture of sexual relations that situate the reader clearly back in the body. The sense of not being able to escape the white man’s obliviously harmful gaze is present in the poem “DOOMSDAY”—a graph upon which the y axis repeats the phrase “a white man” and the x axis depicts scenes like “walks into my office unzips his fly wants resume help” and “walks into my office needs some parenting,” showing us all sorts of social dynamics that exist between Lillian and white men, with white men causing them problems even when Lillian is now in a position of authority and no longer a student. Their frustration is clear in moments like this, when Lillian “ask[s] the AI why white men / keep fucking with my life” in the poem “When I ask the AI about my broken heart.” The repetition of the phrases “white man” and “Black body” woven throughout the collection situates Lillian’s personal experiences within the context of larger societal race relations, calling attention to the racism perpetuated by white men as instigators of violence.
One of the most remarkable accomplishments of the language in this collection is the disruptive and surprising syntax in many of the poems. Lillian disturbs our expectations in poems like “Raw Girl Money,” where they give us lines like “trouble rubbing at my tender”—using an adjective, “tender,” in a placement where we would expect to see a noun. The poem “Maine Coast” contains one of my favorite turns of phrase: “in the bye along a row of shored / Rocks,” where the greeting “bye” is used in place of an expected noun. This is delightfully followed in the next poem with the line “a cute boy lays his cock on your / hi,” once again using a greeting in place of a noun, in this case the expected “thigh.” One more example: “you will die into / the hard pit of a date” uses the verb “die” where we might expect to see the word “bite.” These linguistic performances create an impression of slant rhyme between the written word and the imagined word (“hi” / “thigh” and “die” / “bite”), perhaps mirroring the academic explorations of being a real body versus an imagined body. It is these exciting manners of phrasing that really spark the poetic synapses in my own mind, as if these poems ask us to think in a different way—as if this book as a whole invites us into the complicated experience of being a Black body in a tense public space, one who “can see things, or imagines seeing things, from different perspectives.”
The stakes are clear—it is this racialized othering that results in violence against Black people. In the fragmentary poem “When I ask the AI to predict my future,” we see the fear of being “just like Sandra // dead for doing something // like being // on the way to a new job.” In the poem “’They were armed with long guns,’” we see “I fear for my life at the following places,” and school is repeated 12 times, implying that school, which we expect to be a safe and nurturing environment, is not safe for a Black body walking through its halls. It is the “horror…that in the end / … the white police officers could never be blamed / for what they did, even if we saw the Black man on his bicycle being gunned down / from the back” that exacts an overall sense of injustice that does not mince words: seemingly innocuous racial slights are the foundation for the actions of white men who murder Black people.
Still, even in this world fraught with racism and sexism, Lillian asserts themselves as a sovereign being of both intellectual brilliance and concrete bodily existence—“damn straight / I’m special” they say with confidence. I imagine that this very “articulate” collection is one long middle finger at that white professor who assured them that his covert racism was “not personal.” The adroitness with which Lillian navigates the difficult terrain of race and gender is a triumph, and there is much in this collection to return to again and again.
©2023 West Trade Review
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Metacognition, Syntax and the Black Body in Negative Money, by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
POETRY REVIEW
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