from River Heron Poetry Prize final judge, Shankar Narayan: “This poem, with its complicated interweavings of the many ways in which racism and anti-Blackness can be lethal to those they impact, took my breath away. Opening with a haiku as broken/repaired as the kintsugi it evokes, the poem proceeds to tease apart layer upon layer of complexity within that narrative of inequity, to devastating effect.
In a deceptively simple voice, the poem both reconstructs and deconstructs a straitjacketed world in there are so many ways for the “suspected” to fail (die) and so few to succeed (live)—and enacts a remarkable range of emotional responses to it, in turn plaintive, despairing, questioning, critical, spiritual, and even jocular and hopeful.
Particularly poignantly, the poem evokes internalized oppression—how inequity can lead to self-harm. Craft elements such as the title (evoking a trickster and survivor and whose stories were transmitted through the slave trade) and structure (an embodiment of the divide between those lost and those still here) add to the overall impact.
Within all this, too many lines to count deliver their own individual gut punches, which reward careful attention by opening added dimensions. Ultimately the whole works as powerful testimony that survival itself is a rare commodity in a world shaped by slavery, anti-Blackness, and racism; and that evoking a higher justice may sometimes be the only way to live on. This poem describes exactly which/whose world we’re living in, and how much needs to change.”
Deshawn McKinney is a writer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His art, grounded in hip-hop, explores the delicate balance of existence. Deshawn has built audiences around the world, from Kingston, Jamaica to London, England. He holds an MSc in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MA in Poetry from the University of East Anglia. His work appears in journals such as Lolwe and Glass. His debut chapbook, father forgive me, was published in 2021 by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press.
