suddenly we

“we are the sailors/ we are the ships/ we are the stars/ we are the night”: so declares Pulitzer Prize finalist Shockley (semiautomatic) as she embarks on a journey to discover who we might become to ourselves, to others, together. There’s a contained majesty to this work, a grandeur to the perfectly pared lines, as Shockley steers us through the shimmering spaces of the first section toward a u-shaped figure made of we’s pointedly disclosing the words unique and universe, crucial polarities uniting to form a whole. The second section, “we: becoming & going,” opens with “perched,” a poem expressing exactly the sense of anticipation brimming throughout; the speaker, like a tree, is “alive with change.” But as the section’s subsequent portraits show, becoming fully alive is not always easy, particularly for Black women—Mammy “served as a container for others’ woe”—and the section concludes with a sense of lost time, detour, roads blocked. Starting with “/ a flock of votes, a pride of votes, a murder of votes/ can really make a difference,” the volume’s increasingly expansive poems move forward to a greater sense of community, to the need for a “suddenly we.”