Wake Work
Review of Aricka Foreman’s Salt Body Shimmer (USA: YesYes Books, 2020)
By Jack Xi
This review contains discussions of racist violence, such as slavery and police brutality, and sexual violence.
Salt Body Shimmer is the second collection of poetry by Aricka Foreman—a poet, editor, and educator from Detroit. In it, Foreman enters the depths of intersecting traumas—trauma from enduring an antiblack society, trauma from sexual assault—and celebrates Black freedom and joy amidst suffering.
According to Foreman’s endnotes, she wrote Salt Body Shimmer’s opening poem as an act of what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work.” In Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe describes the Wake as “the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery.” It comprises the effects of slavery and its afterlives, including the process of mourning those killed by police brutality and gun violence. It also entails having to guard the dying vigilantly and being conscious of the antiblackness that shapes Black life. Sharpe’s work declares that justice and democracy in America are predicated upon the extra-legal and legal murders of Black people—that America is inherently unsafe for them. However, she asserts that wake work—taking forms ranging from art to interpersonal care—involves not just mourning, but also confronting erasure from narratives past and present. Wake work must affirm Black existence and care for those drowning in the Wake by attending to their needs and affirming their personhood. Although Foreman explicitly describes Salt Body Shimmer’s first poem only as an act of wake work, her whole collection seems to deeply engage in that project. It both makes visible the currents of the Wake and celebrates Black vitality and art.
The first poem “In the Last Act, Olukún Reminds You of the Origin” displays the pain of the Wake. The title “Last Act” creates a sense of impending death or denouement while the invocation of Olukún—the Yoruban god of the ocean—adds an epic weight to that sense of finality. Foreman’s surreal, dreamlike poem moves between sections portraying different scenarios, each grappling with mortality and discomfort. To wake up each morning is “an incantation/ against disappearing,” a superhuman and magical effort. Foreman considers what “legend” she would leave behind when she dies, while “an ancient thing waits, takes a drag/ off [her] breath.” Death floats to her through the past and present torments that Black people face. It comes through the present’s “heavy news”—the murder of five Black women in her community—and the enslaved ancestors of her past:
[…] sisters
Who saw the thick metal
Caked with rust and salt
Off my waist
Time fractures. The ancestors are her “sisters,” and the shackles appear on her “waist” in the present. This temporal rupture shows how slavery is not simply resolved nor is it a relic of the past; its pain and violence carry into the present. She describes how she dreams of “wails: woe after woe/ after woman,” directly connecting slavery’s pain to the suffering of her “mother” and “[her mother’s] mother too.” Foreman describes an inheritance of destruction and erasure—she is trapped “Between the books / counted Between reneged edicts” by America’s antiblackness. The poem’s last section seems to have Olukún address her, but Olukún’s tone is ambiguous. Does Olukún remember the death levied upon her ancestors and want to provide reparations—or will they claim her too? Can she survive, though deprived of narratives of comfort and assurance?
“In the Last Act” also contains a striking feature of the collection: how Foreman treats punctuation. Many of her sentences lack periods. Sentences start in the middle of lines, truncating the ones before them. Italicized dialogue cuts into images. Meanings are swallowed and interrupted, generating new meaning. They sometimes give the poems a breathless and anxious quality—a nervous speaker, an interrupted speaker, a pained or desperate speaker. This is clear in section II of “In the Last Act”:
Backhand Butt-end of a gun
Who do you think you are A pomegranate
full of questions Each one ready to burst
The violence of the “Backhand” is immediately cut short by the escalated “Butt-end of a gun.” The unpunctuated but interrogative “Who do you think you are” then interrupts the gun-butt. That dialogue, colored by the violence that comes before it, shows how violent acts bleed into each other—how a history of racist dehumanization and devaluation leads to physical violence, and vice versa. Foreman’s lack of punctuation also renders the boundary between human body and object permeable, demonstrating how violence objectifies individuals. She is “a pomegranate” full of arrested, restrained possibilities. The rushing syntax drives home the immediacy and terror of the antiblack violence.
In the rest of the collection Foreman continues to explore her vulnerabilities, creating space for others similarly oppressed. Poems like “You Need[ed] Me” and “Humorism” live with the deaths of Black female victims to gun violence and the police. In them, Foreman displays her struggle to feel safe as the violence and grief she experiences is trivialized by others. The poem “Always Something Here to Remind Me” operates similarly. In it, she describes her reaction to Michael Brown’s killing—soon after her sister’s death—as she enters and leaves a mall. She is set apart from the other people in the poem, who “wince” at her grief but does not understand it. Others dehumanize her by overstepping her boundaries. A cashier at the mall, unaware of Foreman’s grief, challenges her requested shade of foundation. The cashier says, “that can’t be right, you’re much lighter,” then “doesn’t ask before reaching” to apply foundation to Foreman’s wrist. Foreman presents the overlapping constraints of gender and race in this poem, bitterly describing makeup as “the kind/ of camouflage it takes to be a woman.”
The intersections of antiblackness and misogyny appear even in the safe space that therapy is supposed to be. "Before I Fire Her, the Therapist Asks What IS it Like to be a Black Woman HERE: A Monologue" gives voice to this struggle. In “Before I Fire Her,” Foreman arranges various racist statements she has encountered into a run-on block of prose poetry. The statements range from backhanded compliments to tone policing, from microaggression to fetishism. Foreman suggests that her therapist holds the views in the quotes—or has supplied some of them—through the poem’s framing and the ambiguous attribution of each quote. The poem’s final lines say, “Ithaca must be way different than what you’re used to/ You can breathe now, you made it.” They imply that “Detroit” is the problem and that leaving it is the key to healing, showing that her therapist has fundamentally misconstrued Foreman’s problems. The violence facing Foreman and other Black people is not individual to Detroit, but to all of America.
Mired in such pain and invalidation, how then does Foreman heal? She invokes rebirth in the last sections of the collection, alluding to a “failed reincarnation” in the title of one poem, while another is titled “Born Again on a Pilsen Dance Floor.” Joy facilitates her successful rebirth. In “I Got Mad Love,” she describes things like “feeling myself/ on the dance floor in the bedroom,” “[eating] collards out of the pot,” “[calling] a bigot, bigot,” “[masturbating] before/ dressing for work”—she lets loose, does what feels good, lets herself say what is on her mind. In the tender poem “a longed-for, which I enter gratefully,” she describes how she and a lover “touch for the act of touching” and how her lover salves her fresh tattoo scars and helps her feel “safe”:
you: home when I am want
You salve like this&this
Foreman shows herself healing by finding a “home” in other people and feeling at home in her body. She celebrates care for Black existence.
Part of Foreman’s work involves Black art. Foreman draws on lines from musicians like Ibeyi, Betty Davis, and Rihanna. She also references poets like Tracy K. Smith and Pat Parker. Each quote or reference plays a different role in her works. In “Hydrocephalus As a Misnomer for Water God,” lines from Ibeyi’s song “Think of You” express Foreman’s hyperawareness of death when she thinks of her dead sister. Pat Parker’s words from the poem “Goat Child” kickstart one of Foreman’s meditations on rape culture in “Intake Interview.” Black art gives voice to Foreman’s emotions and provides a starting point for her processing them. She celebrates the potential for these narratives of Black being to draw people back from the brink.
Foreman builds on each of these references, at times subverting them. The last poem in the collection “Master of My Make-Believe” draws on the music of Santigold as the poem expresses the feeling of empowerment. The poem takes its title and last line from Santigold’s “Disparate Youth.” It is a prose poem with three sections – the first and last are one line each, while the second comprises two paragraphs. In it, Foreman describes reclaiming her identity, “[taking] back the derecho of [her] name.” She describes the Wake and its erasures—“A history hellbent. Erasing. Burning. The state of nothings”—then moves towards a condemnation of those who uphold antiblack structures, placing herself in a position of sexual power over them. They “dream of” and “hate” their arousal by her, her “tits perched as high as the crisped-brown breasts of [her] feast.”
She then ends “Master of My Make-Believe” by saying, “But if we go, we go together.” That line, hailing from Santigold’s song, stuck with me. It transforms the original song's message of hope into a vengeful declaration of power. Santigold seems to address others held down by oppressive structures, voicing her solidarity with them. Foreman instead addresses those who oppress her and hers, threatening those oppressors with the power that comes from her imagination. “When the future I’ve dreamed of comes, and when I die,” Foreman seems to say, “I’m taking you with me.”
Salt Body Shimmer was a powerful read that I will keep returning to. Foreman expressively captures her experiences and sensations with her thematically united poems and a fresh, tactile aesthetic. This collection’s strength lies in its granularity and its engagement with form. Foreman’s poetry contains a lot of strong and surprising imagery, grounded in physical sensations. In “Sancti Spiritus,” Foreman parallels immersion in the sea with her settling into herself. The sea’s “salt” becomes a living thing, while her name and identity become a physical space:
I walk into the sea, let the salt seed
in the reeds of my hair And maybe this is a kind of
drowning I believe in Thick and slow
Until, I let myself down into myself into current into
babel and swell into my old good name
Foreman masterfully works with repetition, especially in her discussion of healing. Two sets of poems stand out as examples: “Nocturne with Dark Honey” and “Aubade with Dark Honey,” as well as “Breakbeat Nocturne with Anemones and Lucky Fish” and “Breakbeat Aubade with Anemones and Lucky Fish.” The “Aubade” in each pair is an inversion of the “Nocturne,” with the first lines of each Nocturne recast as the ending of its corresponding Aubade. “Nocturne with Dark Honey” opens with:
I burned the last of our summer
beneath the new moon
While “Aubade with Dark Honey” ends with:
Small Summer
Our beneath
The last of a moon
I burned new
Situated in the last section as they are, these poems are part of Foreman’s closing meditation on new beginnings. The recasting of repeated words and images suggests that recovery, or “[burning] new” is something that takes time and reflection. Foreman describes moving forward as requiring destruction, since her burning the “last of [her] summer” is what frees her to “[burn] new.” Foreman moves forward by destroying the obsolete to make room for a new life. Additionally, the way each “Nocturne” becomes an “Aubade” ties into the idea of recovery taking time—moving from night to morning. A sense of promise pervades that pairing too: release will come after suffering. With luck, this blueprint for regeneration will find those who need it most.
Jack Xi (they/he) is a queer Singaporean poet. They are a member of the writing collective /Stop@BadEndRhymes (stylized /s@ber) and can be found at “jackxisg.wordpress.com”. Jack’s been published in OF ZOOS, Wyvern Lit, Perverse, Freeze Ray, Cartridge, and several Singaporean anthologies.