On Camonghne Felix's Debut, Build Yourself a Boat

Emily Pérez reviews Camonghne Felix's debut collection, Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books, BreakBeat Poets Series), for The Rumpus. "Despite occasional connections to kin and community, this bildungsroman spends more time exploring ways the speaker encountered personal and societal harm, armoring herself in response," writes Pérez. More:

...Though they insist on self-reliance, these poems do not sell “up by your bootstraps” bromides—rather they weigh the psychic effort of rowing through life alone.

The book’s opening lines—from “Lost Poem 4: RX”—illustrate the cost: “The psych on duty in triage / Asks me if I want to die, and I say / Not at the moment, no, but stay / Tuned.” In the psych ward, a suicide risk, the speaker is vulnerable and seemingly in the hands of those who can care for her. But she feels she’s still in charge. She can “charm my way out / Of anything” and “save my own life.” She describes herself as “the talented / Tenth of disassociation, the power / Of being just a body within a body / Of jewels.” Much rides on the term “talented tenth”—a concept coined by turn-of-the-twentieth-century white liberals and popularized by W.E.B. Du Bois—which describes the one-in-ten African Americans who could rise to leadership and prominence through education. The concept, at once hopeful and problematic, suggests a route by which post-Civil War African Americans could find equality with whites, while simultaneously reinforcing ideas of exceptionalism. Only classically educated elites will achieve it. Felix expertly leans into this turn. The speaker is among the “talented tenth”—the elite who have “made it” in a world of “charm,” but her expertise is in “disassociation.” She has had to distance herself from feeling to survive; she has had to armor herself in “jewels.”

Will the second poem, “Contouring the Flattening,” nuance the flattened emotional state described in the previous one? “I try not to tell about the stories / still bleeding. After all, who wishes / to lead their own mother to wolves.” But the poem cannot resist telling, at least a little bit, and it continues with a chronicle of an infested childhood home—cockroaches, mice, and men leave eggs, limbs, and detritus behind. Without specifically pinning blame on the mother, the picture here is one of poverty and, at times, neglect. The speaker wishes to “unstitch / this plaque sewn over my / mouth” but instead...

Find out at The Rumpus.