Spit Back A Boy

"And all our sadness will be old Arkansas,/ rural and misspoken, its roads smudged/ by the fog's blue prints, its pine board shacks// daubed with mud to keep out mosquitoes/ and the cold. The kitchens and porches/ where we aren't will cease to exist." We all hear a personal music, and it's up to us to create the moves to go with it. Pollock listens well (as evidenced by these opening lines), and his dance is all strut and stomp, wild and wooly, and filled with the stories he's seen, heard, and lived. Focusing on themes of racial identity, romance, the everyday things in life, and ever-looming mortality, these poems are built on jazz, troubles, pain, gunfire in the night, blues, and the ever-present muse Naomi, who, for her part, hears whale songs in the rattle and the hum of the refrigerator. "Some neighborhood kids wondered/ why I didn't look more like my Mom," says Pollock, whose mother is African American and whose father is white; one day the boy in the poem steals his father's pocketknife, and, "alone, behind the locked door,/ I tried to scrape, as if fish scales,/ the rosy skin from my forearms."