the pause and the breath
Atmosphere Press
$15.99
You can purchase a copy here.
Reviewed by Katch Campbell
“ “Perception is not an act of Understanding.” ”
The early 19th century artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes one of the most useful powers of the sonnet “as the ability to keep a moment, to hold a feeling or experience and turn it around in the light of our awareness until many facets are evident. This multifaceted quality gives the sonnet a paradoxical feeling of freedom and expanse within confines.”
As humans we crave the known, but our brains are activated and more receptive to sensory input in the space of unknown. When blindfolded, our sense of hearing and smell is heightened. By utilizing the confines of sonnet structure, Kwame Sound Daniels provides the reader a safe space to sit next to, enter into, what is currently, less known.
Madness, Trans, Chronically Ill, and Black are the core ideas that drive the language and imagery of Kwame Sound Daniel’s, the pause and the breath, Atmosphere Press, 2023. Xir collection of forty poems utilizes the power of unrhymed sonnets to claim space for these ideas. In our conversation about xir intention, Kwame shared xir hope that we as reader might offer grace in the experience. An expansiveness that lends itself to look inside, self-examine, and ultimately see self in other.
But xe doesn’t ask the reader these things without having done the work xirself. Kwame, a painter, a poet, a student of Neo Slave Narratives, of Ancestral Foods, and of Herbalisim as worship and personal ceremony has scrutinized xirself as an act of self-connection and better understanding. Xe has grappled with self-ownership, the lack thereof in history, and its availability today. The reader can trust the journey through this collection as authentic and necessary. For example, Xe offers a universality of experience that quickly connects the reader to the speaker in the first quatrain of the book’s first sonnet.
MORNING
You weigh yourself. Put on your jacket. You
walk your dog. Drag her away from roadkill.
Pick up her shit. Put on a dress. Drive to
the grocery store. Get a few donuts. Eat
The second quatrain provides the first mention of trans experience and psychic momentum, the third builds upon it and the final couplet a volta toward calm.
them. Wait for the cramping. Take a shit. Weigh
yourself again. Think about how much lessyou will weigh without your breasts. Think about
your decision to grow your hair out and
how it feminizes you. Decide that
you can’t afford to care. Your hair journey
is too important. Loving your routines
is too important. Caring for yourself
is too important. Don’t think about work.
Just write. Just breathe. The day has just begun.
Subsequent sonnets take a more direct path to these ideas /experiences such as “COCSA,” “Body,” and “Couldn’t leave,” while others give a sense of the madness and confusion, including “Pronouns” and “TIME.” But hope and empowerment are incorporated deftly, requiring a second and third reading of the collection out of respect, as witness, and from the beginnings of internalization.
Hunger
I taught myself I had to be hungry
for my own gender, that I had to carve
out a bowl to hold androgyny
that I could never achieve being fat.
I painted myself with emphatic oils,
I fired myself in my own fear. Not once
did I crack under the heat. My hunger
was well-made, developed. There was no
filling me. I became content with what
I knew. I kept myself starved because it
was safer than knowing. My truth was in
the absence. Falsehoods were the feminine,
until the feminine satisfied the
appetite I cultivated for love
Kwame Sound Daniels’ generosity of experience and expression thereof, is the power of vulnerability and of one human’s willingness to do the work. At the end of our hour-long conversation xe asked, “How would it (the world) be if I didn’t invite you?”.
I believe, we are the richer for it.
Katch Campbell is a connector. With a master’s degree in Science and an MFA in poetry, she creates metaphors for her patients and others about the world around us. Her work is an inquiry on the atrocities we commit consciously and unconsciously against each other and the universe. Katch serves as Vice President and is a permanent faculty member at the River Pretty Writing Retreat, a bi-annual workshop in the Ozarks. She has co-led immersive poetry trips to Slovenia and Italy and used to edit for ZoMag.com.