SHO BY DOUGLAS KEARNEY
Sho, the seventh collection from poet and librettist Douglas Kearney, is a stunning union of poetic formalism and sonic performance. Through rhythmic experimentation using Black vernacular, artificial language, and song lyrics, Kearney’s poems are powerful examinations of masculinity, race, and Christian faith.
Kearney’s book provides a boisterous follow-up to his last collection, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. Once again, Kearney’s challenging use of the lyric stretches language to its limits to lay bare both past and present forms of violence in America.
Through a dense lexicon and dizzying prosody, these poems avoid voyeuristic looks at trauma. Instead, readers find shifting syncopation and rhyme, repetition and exclamation troubling attempts to gaze at others’ pain, which leaves us pondering a dark link between violence and entertainment. Kearney speaks directly on this intersection in devastating poems like “Welter,” where the discovery of a mass grave in Myanmar overlays with simultaneous coverage of a boxing championship.
Despite the collection’s moments of pain, Kearney’s play with language also extends into humor. “She got an existential dilemma so I call her ‘Big Booty,”’ he writes in “Deformation,” riffing off the 2 Chainz lyric before launching into a pun-filled investigation of selfhood.
The collection’s bold language is coupled with formal restlessness. Poems squeeze themselves in tight blocks only then to spread sparse lines across pages. Such innovative choices guide our focus to Kearney’s spectacular diction, making language a living thing.
Sho exemplifies the daring possibilities for poetry today. Despite the devastation held within our lexicon, words hold the dazzling potential that we can rise through language to “come up clutching what is under— / come back striking / what’s above.”
—Review by CD Eskilson
