MarginMan

Rating: 3 1/2

A lot of poetry packed into this smallish book. 142, by my count, many of which are quite short. Topics include small town life in the South, black cultural figures, and family. Aubert's writing is often free of punctuation, so navigating his lines can be difficult. Some of these pieces seem expendable. But his best work is worth the read.

Here are a few poems that stood out to me:

"Uncle Bill"
"Dayton Dateline / Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906"
"One Way It Can Come About"
"Niagara"

A couple fragments worth noting:

there is enough of you in me
I tremble knowing the soft places
we can hurt - "Woman In Me"

But it was better to have missed James Baldwin
than not to have waited for him at all. - "James Baldwin, 1924-1987"