& MORE BLACK by t’ai freedom ford
by Darla Himeles
Which way’s up? Which way’s down? t’ai freedom ford’s new collection, & more black, invites readers to spin its body in both hands, cradling the spine, opening and reopening, trying to make heads or tails of how to navigate its design: two roughly equal-sized sections of sonnets that are oriented between two front covers, suggesting two books within a book. Each opens right-side-up as long as you hold its front cover with the spine to the left; if you turn to what might be the back cover, you find another front cover upside down; turn it right side up, and another beginning begins: each half has its own praise page — one quoting praise by Terrance Hayes and another quoting Patrick Rosal — and each has its own title page, table of contents, cohesive set of poems, acknowledgments page, and author bio.
Each half has its own groove, its own personality: the author bio on one half is more traditional, naming ford as a high school teacher and listing a selection of her impressive publications and accomplishments; the bio on the other half bucks the traditions conformed to in the first: it tells the reader that ford’s is a collection of what she calls “‘Black ass sonnets,’ which take their cues from Wanda Coleman’s ‘American sonnets’” and which “are rebellious, outspoken, and take no shit. They investigate Black art, Black bodies, Black sexuality, and Black language, unapologetically and with a capital B” (52). However you spin the cover, however you read the spine, & more black doubles into a kind of chant: “& more black & more black & more black,” and the page dividing the halves from one another is a black page: more black.
The cover images are two paintings by Black contemporary artist Alexandria Smith called The Skin We Speak and the skin we speak, and both depict two Black, large-breasted, nude bodies touching at the nipples and standing, it seems, hip-high in water. The book’s design functions like two bodies also embracing, but the poem-bodies meet in the center head to toe, in the formation of 69 or of L7, more likely — two Black queer bodies (& more black & more black) built from the same Black-inflected sonnet form, singing unapologetically queer Black emotion, intellectualism, diction, and music.
The poems epigraphically honor and respond to (mostly) Black artists and leaders, such as musician Erykah Badu, photographer Carrie Mae Weems, activist Sojourner Truth, conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, and photographer Ryan McGinley, suggesting that the poem-bodies carry within them the traditions and voices and moods of so many other bodies. And too we hear the rhythms of Hayes and Rosal, to say nothing of Langson Hughes and Ross Gay and Monica Hand (& more & more). The effect is one of calling up ancestors and brothers and sisters into communal embrace. Doing so within these nipple-kissing covers is conceptually layered and, frankly, sexy.
But listen: these poems have a lot more up their sleeves; these sonnets sing the queer Black body electric with joy, with grief, with anger, and with a contagious freedom that drives me to want to dig deeper into my own body’s stories. In “instructions for freedom,” which is after the contemporary queer Black artist Amaryllis Dejesus Moleski, ford performs acrobatic poetic freedom just as she writes about it in the poem’s final lines:
shooting stars ain’t nothing but black
chicks doing back flips fuck flux: gravitate
black & rotate that axis till this universe
(((collapses)))
Yes, ford writes in the tradition of Coleman’s sonnets — fourteen- or sometimes fifteen-lined poems that trade Shakespeare’s rhythms and rhymes for a music both tighter in its internal slant rhymes and looser in its leaps between the complicated scansions of jazz or hip-hop or the clever compressions of Ebonics (see “dear Ebonics”). These poems are verbal dances that move the poems from the head to the whole of the body, which wants to tighten and loosen and clench and love and groove as it reads.
In ford’s “transcript of an MTA audition,” she brings to mind some of Terrance Hayes’s own sonnets too, such as his “sonnet,” which repeats fourteen times the perfect iambic pentameter of “We sliced the watermelon into smiles.” Hayes, in this and so many of his other cleverly subversive sonnets, speaks into the oppressive weight of American racism with a single, repeating, slicing line. In ford’s poem, a comment on “man-spreading” and the more insidious problem of toxic masculinity, each line starts “i sit wide-legged.” The poem begins,
i sit wide-legged & grab my crotch
i sit wide-legged & adjust my nuts
i sit wide-legged & shift my dick two millimeters to the left
i sit wide-legged & scratch my balls
ford’s sonnet calls out the ways toxic masculinity dominates public space just as it subverts through its mockery and through its placement in a book that could not more gloriously assert the wild intellectual and larger than life beauty of Black feminist queerness.
Like this book itself, ford is a kind of a magician. Which way’s up? Which way’s down? Yes. Queer & more queer. Black & more black. Keep spinning it. Keep landing on the black blank page in the heart of the book. Keep spinning with the glory of “black / chicks doing back flips,” with the swagger of shooting stars. This is a book you won’t want to put down — especially if you, like me, are particular about your spines facing in the “right” direction.
Nope: don’t shelve this one. Trust me, I’ve barely said 10 percent of what there is to say about this text, which I hope scholars and poets and visual artists will be exploring deeply for generations. Keep this book warm next to your body. Keep reading, keep spinning: & more black & more black & more black & more black —
