“Every Hard Sweetness”

Sheila Carter-Jones
BOA Editions, $19

One sweltering evening last summer, in the back room of a Lawrenceville brewery, the poet Sheila Carter-Jones gave a particularly powerful reading. She introduced a selection of poems from her new book, “Every Hard Sweetness,” by telling the audience, “I’m from a small coal-mining town, and during the ’60s, my dad was beaten by cops and sent to a state hospital for the criminally insane. And all he did was be a Black man with a voice.”

Carter-Jones’ father was incarcerated for 6½ years beginning in June 1965. “Every Hard Sweetness,” the cover of which is illustrated by photos of the author’s parents as young children, is about trauma. Specifically, it is an unflinching study of the pain and lasting damage — personal, familial and national — inflicted by institutional racism. The poem “My First Boyfriend Is A Dark Silhouette Of Moon” sets the stage:

“A total eclipse happens when

an ordinary man is abducted and packed away

in a place nicknamed cold storage for the way voices

demanding change are clipped. My mother’s mind is stolen too,

but her body is still here, Inside the house we teeter

on a narrow orbit called family.”

The poem “Facts” explores how history is manipulated and distorted to both reinforce and exonerate the prevailing power structure: “the teacher teaches that slaves loved / to sing for their masters. // He says slaves loved to dance for / their masters. Pictures // in my U.S. history book prove it.”

Carter-Jones is also interested in how bureaucratic language by way of its very blandness can be an instrument of violence, as in these lines from “Anatomy Of A System.” “Race: Black/Negro. Gender: Male. / Attitude: Threatening. Mental Capacity: / Twelve-year-old. Notes: seems to have / his own philosophy about his place in / society. Diagnosis: Schizophrenic.”

“Every Hard Sweetness” is an incredible collection of poems — one that very much speaks to the current moment in our country. At that reading last year, Carter-Jones reflected on her recent process: “It took me a while to write this book. Each poem was a traumatic experience for me. I cried the entire time. I’m glad that I got it out. ’Cause I think I can live with less heaviness in my life.”