Poetic Conversations: Queering Dys-Utopia: KB Brookins’ Freedom House and the Poetics of Possibility
I was supposed to write this review half a year ago. I have given many different people different excuses: a period of deep personal struggle. A period of fallow artistry. A period of complete political turmoil in which the government which claims me has struck down abortion protections, produced hundred of bills aimed at LGBTQIA+ people (especially children), and supported a genocide in Palestine, among its usual atrocities. While taking the small actions available to me, I still found myself overwhelmed, frozen, struggling to carry the despair that threatened to completely take hold of my psychological state at any time. But reading back through the complex threads in KB Brookins’ Freedom House, I realize I have had in my hands exactly the kind of book I was looking for during this difficult period: a bounty of complex, emotional poems that both hold and challenge the reader in their attempts to think through living in our current, specific apocalypses.
Freedom House takes after its title its construction, with different sections representing rooms of a home. But this is no lengthy lyric interested only in interiority: Brookins’ speakers are inextricably enmeshed in the real world communities where they live and breathe, whether it is the list of businesses that exploited the speakers’ labor in “Curriculum Vitae,” the nervous glances across the waiting room in “Sexting at the Gynecologist,” or intimate, specific pain and loss of place in gentrification in “Every Building in East Austin is a Ghost.” This latter poem strikes, “I don’t know much / about place, except that history is epistolary / & fresh paint is sometimes mixed with blood. // Heaven be a Rosewood Park Juneteenth. Hell be a rent increase by property tax.” (6)
I am struck by how Brookins balances the political landscape here: that history is epistolary, documented, between people; while at the same time politics so often are decided by abstract ideas, like taxes, that concretely displace people from their homes. It is easy to imagine the joy and community in the phrase “Heaven be a Rosewood Park Juneteenth.” Its specificity and immediacy are not only located in place and time but with the speaker’s beloved, exact community — its music. The preponderance of the law and loss of specificity in the following line is evidence of the violence of disappearance not only in its meaning, but in its language. “Hell” is next to “rent increase,” “property tax;” the words themselves take up real estate, destroy the beauty, music and pride that was previously there.
Transformation is not only destructive in Freedom House. Brookins balances new and invented forms to situate themselves as a poet centrally interested in finding and creating the language they need to make sense of their experience of the world. They also add their own fragments to the grand tapestry of Queer and Trans Writing, Southwestern Writing, and all the other identities and intersections they align with. As a fellow trans poet, I felt immediately connected to the incredible formal work in this book: even in the poems titled “T Shot #__”, where the assumption would be toward similar formal constructions, there is short free verse, long free verse, right alignment, quatrains — and did I mention the numbers aren’t even in order? These poems, so earnestly invested in both the past, present, and future, seem to laugh at the idea that linear time might be the only way to document their struggles, joys, and complications.
There are classic forms like the ghazal and palindrome, and invented forms like the previously mentioned “Curriculum Vitae,” modeled after a CV for job applications, and “Fuck Me, Jeff Bezos” modeled after the recommendation text when one buys something on Amazon. These poems shift and vary, modeling both history and invention as they find the language necessary for their eruptions of transformative language, their necessary rage and surprising, awe-inspiring tenderness in love and appreciation of family and friends.
While Freedom House is a book that doesn’t shy away from tragedy, violence, and political action, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that it is just as deeply rooted in tenderness, loyalty, and the possibilities of love. Just as dystopia looks to imagined landscapes to understand how structural oppressions might grow and evolve, utopias can use imagined landscapes to help us find the creative possibilities of the perfect world we must strive to achieve. Freedom House uses the subject of utopia in verse in truly special and limit-breaking ways. The opening poem, “Black Life Circa 2029” is one of the most immediately memorable of the collection, and for good reason: this poem imagines a utopia where Black people get to live without fear of persecution and violence at the hands of whiteness (contained in the carceral systems of the US government, or otherwise); but it also imagines freedoms from individual family and community traumas, as well, “I visit my mother regularly & tell her I love her. / I don’t flinch when my father raises his arm. / My father raises his arm to hug me. / … I walk the eastside & don’t get hit on. / Black men gleam gold teeth, and there are no police” (1).
Lines like these through the poem, positioned so closely to one another, point to the interwoven nature of seemingly different struggles: a world without racism & its oppressions must by definition be one without patriarchy and its tyrannies, one where families treat each other with more care, where strangers treat each other with more care. This is intersectionality at its most emotionally impactful, a tapestry of needs and cares that is just as much manifesto as it is song.
There are so many layers to Freedom House that this essay may feel incomplete. I haven’t mentioned the heart-tugging, vulnerable queer love poems, like “Snake Plant,” where the speaker admits their imperfections, “Funny: you let me into you like love / living through the snake plant no matter my sometimes-neglect” (56). I haven’t mentioned the way this collection weaves nature into its architecture, how a climate politics is central to a community politics of care for how we live in the world. I haven’t mentioned how moments of rage, grief, and joy are punctuated by a humor so keen the speaker feels like sharing jokes with an old friend (consider the title of the poem, “He/they in the streets, they/them in the sheets”).
This is a collection of both deep and wide-reaching thought, a collection with something for everyone to learn from and appreciate, an offering by the author for which I will always be grateful to share. Troubled by the world, reading and thinking again with these poems, I am reminded of the opening paragraph of queer theoretician Jose Esteban Munoz’s Cruising Utopia: “Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” When the quagmire of the present takes me again, I know I will return to Freedom House, knowing it always has more to offer from its very foundations, its room of thought, its imagined futures we would be lucky to help build.
Let me leave with a poem to carry with you, quoted here in its entirety:
Love Machine by KB Brookins
after The Miracles
All this time I thought we needed permission
to dance. Flap our imaginary wings. Schlep
sweat on our foreheads while making up moves
in every dancing scene. My people are good at
dreaming up new grooves in the time it takes
one foot to pick itself up on the soul train.
We are love machines, unable to work for nobody
but rhythm, its everyday insistence on giving us
hope. No wonder why we can see a world without
police. Every day we smash badges under our busy
-good feet. We were made to see everything
beautiful before it hops & skips out of us.
