Jonah Mixon-Webster’s sophomore collection of poems, Promise/Threat, signals a new approach to place-based writing. Flint, MI, where Mixon-Webster is from, informs this book’s topography, but is never named in the poems.
Instead, Mixon-Webster’s poems exist as dreamscapes and irrecoverable figments.
“Inchoate Chatter” exemplifies the way Mixon-Webster troubles the idea of place, set as it is at the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts and skewering the modernist poet’s casual racism. Derrida, ventriloquizing Marx, reminds me, he writes, that due to great violence, our sense, / of time is disjointed. And I assume / that our sense of place is disjointed along / with it."
In a recent interview with the Rumpus, Mixon-Webster puts the formulation like this: “most Black Americans experience: being haunted by the placiality of America while also haunting the place in return.” And Mixon-Webster’s poems are haunting in the ways they live with the reader after the book itself is cast aside.
These are city poems, to be sure, but there’s a dreamlike quality to Mixon-Webster’s verse that transcends realist tropes. Several of these poems take place in the liminal space between dream and waking, and for Mixon-Webster, our identities must be reconstructed daily from what we can ratify as lived experience and what we can sort into the epoch of a dream. This sorting’s an ultimately impossible epistemological task, and the poems gain dynamism as a result of the poet’s refusal to neatly categorize states of being.
In the title poem "the speaker woke burying the memory of myself and myself chewing glass," the glut of selves and past selves are as generative as they are unnerving. The act of chewing glass happens after a car accident that serves as the book’s primal scene. In “We Might Crash Out in This Poem,” the speaker alludes to “a parked Impala bound by shadow,” the proper automobile noun a giveaway that our poet comes from a car town. The violence of smashing glass and twisted metal is one of the city’s perils, and we learn in this poem that even these seemingly incidental violences are racist in their design: We eat the pavement / and I hold his holy body toward salvation. Imagine, / three black men born to die dying, slowly.
The affirmations in Promise/Threat are never stable, by which I mean cheap, and the threats are ever-present. Mixon-Webster holds out hope, though, that the poetic imagination can sacralize our many selves, and there’s redemption in these lines: wish I saw it was us all making it to our destination… Three black men lived today / despite an accident, one was deathless, the other one spoke but couldn’t / breathe much but he’s conscious now, also. The figures in the accident do not ultimately crash out, and the poem ends with the possibility of healing, both physical and psychic: You, looking at me wishing us life. The both of us / wishing more healing. Well, my brother, we already have it.
