Montana Ray: The Concrete Poems of (guns & butter)
By Stacy Parker Le Melle
Born in 1974, I was too young to watch Blaxploitation films first run but soon I’d admire the images of Black goddesses and guns and everything we were supposed to want in America — the movie poster iconography of sex, power, and money. Look at Johnnie Hill on that poster for Velvet Smooth. Pam Grier cradling her sawed-off shotgun on the poster for Coffy. They looked strong. They looked hot. They looked like they didn’t take mess from anyone. With a gun, you could believe you were finally free. As long as you were never overpowered by an opponent. As long as the Feds didn’t show up armed to the teeth.
In America, notions of gun rights, and merits, are fiercely debated. I live in Harlem in 2017. In the 1980s, drug-trade crime overwhelmed these streets. Today, I feel a strong level of personal safety. I close my green steel door and believe I’ve protected myself and my family from the outside world. We don’t keep guns. We think they make us unsafe. Yet I’m aware that personal well-being is just that — personal. I wish all of my neighbors would melt down their guns but I don’t know what trauma they can’t bear to repeat. What promise the gun whispers when it’s hidden in the drawer.
The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports that in 2010 there were 31,076 Americans who lost their lives to gun-involved homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings, per CDC statistics. That year we lost three Americans per hour to gun violence. In 2011, according to FBI data presented by Everytown for Gun Safety, 53% of women murdered with guns in the U.S. were killed by intimate partners or family members. Many gun-owners carry guns to fend off attackers, but the Gun Violence Archive statistics as presented by Armed with Reason show that in 2014 there were fewer than 1600 verified defensive gun uses. Guns promise to protect us from aggressors but the statistics show we have a much higher chance of being hurt by guns than being helped by them.
The first time I see poet Montana Ray’s book (guns & butter) I am struck by the cover art Fresh Bouquet by Dawn Whitmore. For me, it is a new iconography with its hand-painted pistol on a flower print-like wallpaper in a mother’s kitchen. In the corner, a handful of decorative blue gems. Is this the haul from a woman’s heist? I look again. What’s the takeaway from this feminized tableau? Can a woman ever get out ahead carrying death on her hip?
The pretty gun on the cover of (guns & butter) seduces you to open the book and encounter more guns. But this time, they are poems shaped as guns, and they are complicated works of art. In this collection, Montana Ray creates both literary and visual art with her concrete poems, a form of poetry where the shape of words on the page construct meaning. “Concrete poetry is about machinery,” says Ray in an interview. “The founders of the concrete poetry movement in Brazil sought to create poem machines.” Ray’s concrete poems form pistols, and pop-guns, and upside-down guns if you count the recipes she includes as text. “The form allows you to work out what you’re trying to say,” says Ray. Montana Ray’s gun poems contain many truths at once, especially when juxtaposed to her printed recipes for white chocolate banana bread, a chorizo and egg dish, and a rum cocktail — the “butter” of the book, sustenance that can be nourishing or bloating, depending on your intake.
