Reviewed by Jessica Cuello

If genius is connecting what has heretofore been viewed as disparate, Richard Hamilton does so in Rest of US. His debut collection moves fluidly from the Haitian Revolution to early 20th century boxer Jack Johnson to Serena Williams to "Reagan's handiwork disappearing the most vulnerable" as it encompasses a Black history of North America. Yet Hamilton's poetry resists category—it tenderly threads together overlapping modes of existence via sexuality, race, class, and disability while examining the insidious way that white brutality and white fear operate. In short, it is a book with historical breadth and analytical depth, but it startles and moves the reader with the associative beauty of its poetics.

Rest of US has a current of energy running through it, a momentum drawn from the connections among people across history within a single geography. This energy is partly due to the versatility of form in the book. Hamilton deftly inhabits villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, ekphrastic poems, epistolary writing, and other forms. In an artist statement that opens the book, Hamilton says that his work "contemplates a literary kill-strategy through the subversion of traditional received forms to exterminate bourgeois liberal disregard for the sick, poor, abused, and ailing." It's true—the protean nature of his forms is disruptive, the way that love is disruptive, and the language leaps off the page as we encounter puns (the title itself), litany, persona, and a compelling use of repetition.

In "Black and White (Ode to the Haitian Revolution, 1791)," Hamilton links Saint Domingue to Birmingham to Ferguson; the poem swiftly moves from the lives of Haitian slaves to the four Black girls killed in Birmingham: "carved through the dank hull of slave ships carrying dandelion and devil's / claw, the future of four ghosted girls." The use of "we" throughout the work speaks to Hamilton's absence of an other: there is no other. From the same poem: "if ever there was a tree, we hung from it—" and "We are dried palm fronds and gun powder." The overlap of personal and historical at the core of this book is one of its most affecting elements. Boundaries of time and space (and even body) are immaterial. We see that racism, exploitation, and cruelty reassert themselves in the same way across time. Hamilton engages us with a collective but defiant response to such dehumanization.

Hamilton erases the illusion of time or delineated/contained space through the speed of his language. His syntax moves with a relentless and reverberating presence; it reflects time within language—the past as present. Take the short imperatives in "They Pride:" "tell me what level / of death // or disability // you choose / to accept // at PRIDE / Tell me // he she / they me" or "Pull back the wrecking ball, love. Assemble, brick by brick" in the poem "Imbrication." Similarly, in "White Bull with Broken Chains (for John Arthur “Jack” Johnson)," Hamilton writes with the same rhythmic explosion: "you glide. No, you wander. No, you lance. No, you ride the white wave / and trigger." In his poem "Wild Thing (Ode to Serena Williams in post-partum catsuit)," the lines propel forward with iambs of subject/verb, much like the volleying of a tennis ball:

I hiss. I ask
for it. I bitch.
I bleed.

I tongue. I cheek.
I swerve. I sweep.
I hone the art
of discipline.

Hamilton includes a note that the poem "is a response to artist Ronald Williams's digital collage entitled Wild Thing wherein Williams examines race and body-shaming faced by world tennis champion Serena Williams." This artwork, and other artwork, is included in the book. In the piece, Serena Williams wears a leopard print suit while she serves the ball. Her racket has a Black power fist on the strings, and her other hand is lifted with a raised middle finger. On the flesh of her body are representations of Black women in media. A broken chain hangs from one wrist. In "Wild Thing" and the above-mentioned poems, a self or historical figure encounters a world hostile to its body.

As Hamilton looks backward through the racist, exploitative history of the Americas, he pivots from past to present through the sharp vitality of his language. In "Corn Tax: A History," Hamilton collapses the distinction between different eras, between I and They. The lines move quickly in a repetition of sound and of wordplay (the doubleness of language): "Our history is a field of corn. / Our mothers comb the iron gates." And later "Our hands of kernel cash." Also "Our breath of shuck piano mourns. / Our field of bending boughs. / Our dead embalm her hem." The repetition launches us through time, coalescing into a unity of experience via images of capital, music, and familial ties.

One of my favorite poems in the book, the longer poem "Alabama Inmate Notes," is formed around such (seemingly) disparate collectivity of voice. Much of the poem is composed of poems and songs by men (Dale Little, Moses Wingate, Richard Sandlin) who were serving time in the Bibb County Correctional Facility in Brent, Alabama while Hamilton worked on this book. The poem is broken into numerated sections, but it reads like a dreamlike call and lament:

From 1.: 

we have families we hurt in real life

From 5.:

I am lonely, starving
for intimacy, femininity, affection:

------------------------------------

In the dream,
you are dressing my calf
in lamb's ear, lighting tea
candles, my hand to the psalm:

-------------------------------------

It is a Black
psalm, a psalm for lonesome
visitors.

Two of the later sections simply express desire for beauty and love: "Please give me my flowers while I'm / still here" and "I'd prefer to write love poems."

The “notes” integrate lines from Lorca, Stein, and Thich Nhat Hanh in an amalgam of song and poem that expresses longing for joy and beauty. It is a metaphor for the book: a lament from the tender human interior, collectively sung amid the literal bars of a prison.

Rest of US engages with the forms of love and its existence. "Love is not / a ruse or tug-of-rope," he writes in "Budding or 'Black Boy Wonder'" and, in "Who Let Marcos Drown?" there is poignant tenderness for a childhood companion:

It should come

as no surprise. This city of God and violet stars were touching
the shooting stars. The pool was a sinkhole, enveloping earth, black
crag of hunger, deep end

of our birth we almost forgot. I held and released, his elastic
waistband, again to hear it snap. I want his brilliant body back, don't you?

Yet, the intimacy here should not cloud the fact that Hamilton writes directly of the most violent and shameful historical moments. In fact, one of the intended messages of Rest of US is that love exists simultaneously with cruelty. Take, for instance, one of the most painful poems in the book, "Mary Turner Don't You Weep," based on the widely circulated postcard of lynch victim Mary Turner. Written as a prose poem, the whole poem is two sentences that occur in a rush of sound and image. Pregnant Mary Turner was lynched for denouncing the lynching of her husband; her torturers cut the baby from her womb.

Hamilton describes "a Black woman, a mother, a girl-woman, an object hanging from her toes like a winged nocturnal emission, flesh innards spilling out from the crude slice down her distended belly, the brown baby's limp and threatening interior on the ground crushed under a lynch man's boot." Even in the grotesque moment of her death, Hamilton represents her as multiple, her baby as "winged" while the torturer is a lynch man reduced to his boot. The poem, difficult in its violence, arranges the images in an elegy. Hamilton acknowledges cruelty but it is subsumed by admiration and reverence for Mary Turner. Here, he displaces cruelty and takes the violent act away from the center of a person's identity.

Hamilton writes in his artist statement that "Rest of US centers the impact of the Haitian Revolution on American soil." I confess that I lost this thread as I moved through the book. While the artist statement provides historical context, it's nevertheless the poems in Rest of US that apprehend how racism reconstitutes itself. Hamilton's debut reveals that history is not linear, nor is it distant, and the only response left to us is the disruptive, unsettling force of love.