Nicole Sealey

I can’t image the work it took to read through The Ferguson Report to create poetry, finding letters and partial and complete words in an existent text. In addition, reading the document, with its retelling of a horrible event, had to spur a deep emotional response, obviously reflected in the found poem. The very fact that part of the poem–the words all from the report, remember–uses the word “force” fifteen times is telling.

The Report talks about “revenue generating” as a show more priority, with the police aggressively “enforcing” the code. Examples are offered of police going after innocent people and accusing them of a crime. Of course, the police were racially biased.

Whoever says death comes in threes is an optimist.
from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey

The poem Sealey finds in the report begins with highly charged imagery– horses neighing, dogs barking, being at gunpoint, setting up a scene of threat. A deer “flees seconds too late.” The images become more particular with men facedown, with knees on their necks, and ends with the opening of the Miranda Rights.

The entire report appears, the text grey and struck through, the embedded found poetry in black. Then, Sealey’s poem is presented in its entirety. I found reading the poem both ways rewarding. Seeing the poem in the document gave a greater understanding of the context, while reading the poem whole offered flow and comprehension of it as a work on its own.

I am quite stunned by the creativity and passion of this work.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. show less

Remarkably well-done, for a form that doesn't often hold up. Thoughtful and challenging.

The best poems in this collection are agile, far-reaching, and playful in a way that is also deadly serious. The attention to sound, pace, and rhythm is often extraordinary.

Some extraordinary moments and a big range—flat, declarative surprising poems and then formal, elegant surprising poems and then dense, quirky, heady, surprising poems. A terrific poet but a somewhat slight book. I love a real BOOK of poems, but rarely do I like as many individual poems as much as I do many here. Medical History, A Violence, Cento for the Night..., and the stunning Even the Gods.