Winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition
The poem from which Black Under derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: " I am black and black underneath." These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson' s debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems' linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma' s still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson' s dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.
Black Under layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies- and incongruences- of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.
"Surprising vernacular, elements of situational discomfort, unexpected and welcome meditations of social impact and situational trauma. There is a subtle and beautiful notion of the absurd within the seemingly mundane of society in general, noted specifically in unreasonable treatment of disadvantaged characters and in the willfulness of perpetrators close and far. These perils leave the audience with a similar, though vicarious, notion and call upon us to do better by ourselves, for others, and with a need to rectify after being delivered into the wrath." -Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue"
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
"Ashanti Anderson's refusal and rise in this collection recenter me in my communities, and in my Chicananess. Because the speakers in Black Under are fully aware of the white gaze and are absolutely unconcerned with its survival. Instead, they're focused. Anderson writes, 'I erased my smile in another poem because someone said it made no sense,' and follows with, 'if you want blood I will have for you my red wet grin.' I've read these poems again and again, and every time I leave like-it's we time. With lines like 'throat unbuttons its sound,' and 'I wish trumpets for my last breath,' we end up communing with people who remember themselves, over and over, the way they were, and the way they are and are and are." -Sara Borjas, author of Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff"
