Daylight

Videos of performance poet Marsh show a physical, powerful performer who can make audiences cry with her while she also shows the sly shadow of a grin when she's pinning whiteness and patriarchy to the wall. Remarkably, in her first collection, the poems occupy the page as successfully as they flow through a microphone, using form and space to meticulous effect. In "in broad daylight bruised black girls look goals," a blackout poem tells the story of Tonie Nicole Wells, whose #relationshipgoals marriage went viral just months before her husband murdered her; poem and subject both flash in and out of the ability to articulate fear. Several of the poems focus on queer identity, especially the impulse for men to sexualize and control lesbian identity for their own ends. Marsh claps back hard against this idea: "i say Black Joy they faces go into panic. like how I know / happiness when they didn't plan it?" This is a book of rage, hurt, and determination from an important young voice.

Fulfilling that old-fashioned term tomboy as she was growing up, nationally ranked poet/performer Marsh didn't see anyone like her in either the neighborhood or the media. Now, in a straight-at-you debut, she talks about being a butch black woman, revealing a complex, hard-won sense of identity grounded in her physical being. "For what it's worth i ain't never wanted to be no man," she insists, while also confronting this country's long history of racism. Hunting down her ancestry, she encounters a feckless white woman and cuttingly comments, "results say i'm hers/ in history/ in old law," even as painful vignettes of racial oppression give way to the observation, "even black will crack if you beat it enough." VERDICT Throughout, you can hear the pain--and this performer's stage strut, though these poems are as easily and rewardingly read as heard.