Sliver by the River

This past Thursday, I read at Skye Jackson’s book release event for her poetry collection, Libre. The event took place at the Marigny Opera house, a venue where I’ve never performed. The space is beautiful—soaring cathedral ceilings, an air of mystery, and a sense that the building is even older than New Orleans itself. The pop idol Solange got married there for a reason.

Not only was it a beautiful place to read, it was packed with so many people I know from my time at the University of New Orleans, or from MCing Dogfish, or just socially from operating in the New Orleans literary scene for so many years. I wasn’t surprised to see Ted Moree recording the whole thing, but it had been a long time since I’d seen him, and it’s always great fun to watch him work. During the show, Jason Rodriguez worked on a painting of Skye.

One of my favorite things about the event was hearing verse by Penda Smith, whom I’ve never encountered before. She’s a product of LSU’s MFA program, but more than that, she is a product of New Orleans—a bright young Black queer poet with so much to say, who is already working hard as an educator to help shape and guide the generations that come after her. I’m truly excited to hear and read her work again. She’s already making waves in the scene, and there’s no telling what she’ll do as she grows. Events like this one are what make it so difficult to live outside the city. This is an event I would love to have attended even if I wasn’t participating as a reader.

Skye’s collection is truly amazing. I first met her during the Dogfish days, when I think she might still have been training at UNO’s poetry MFA program. Her verse has always carried a particular grace and honesty, even when discussing ugly emotions, circumstances, and encounters, and the contents of Libre are no exception to that—especially the title poem. Her collection shows a profound mastery on a number of levels, and as I work on my own collection, it will serve as a road map. I was invited to read poetry at the online Parsec meeting this Saturday, and I made sure to recommend Skye’s book along with the works of Carolyn Hembree, Brad Richard, and Jericho Brown.

I often think of the five-and-a-half years that show ran, all the people who came through to perform, experience, and discuss poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and music. I haven’t had a chance to build anything like it—first because of the global Pandemic that shut the show down, and then because I lacked the time and resources to mount a show of my own. It’s not that I’m nostalgic for that period, or that I forget the struggles I and my co-producers (Cate Root, Taylor Murrow, and Jessica Kinison, who graciously opened her home for the event every month), but there really was something special about that period, the experience of Dogfish.

Before I moved to New Orleans, home was just wherever my family was. I felt a connection to Tunis, Tunisia, to Carthage, both ancient and modern, that I could never fully understand or explain, but it was never a home to me—partly because of the colonialist experience of living there on the American Embassy’s dime, partly because I was a visitor to the culture, the language, the history. I was a transplant to New Orleans, as well, but it made a difference that I moved there by my own choice after visiting, and it made even more of a difference that I lived there for 18 years.

I found the last piece I needed to make New Orleans my home when I read Big Machine by Victor LaValle. In it, he laid out two powerful ideas: that the despised become despicable, and that the way to interrupt and possibly reverse that process is to invite them in. Reading that book changed how I interacted with my neighborhood, my neighbors, my city, and pushed me to fully integrate myself instead of thinking of myself as a visitor and an outsider. I’ve always been conscious of my transplant status, and I never wanted to take up space in New Orleans that was not meant to me. There are too many people who move to that city and begin remaking it in the image of wherever they come from, and I never wanted to do that to the city I love most in the world.

 The thing I love most about New Orleans is New Orleans. Its people, its culture, its music, its food, and its history. Like the best literary work created there, New Orleans warm, it’s difficult, it’s vibrant, and it reverberates in the hearts and minds of visitors long after they experience it. This Carnival season, I haven’t been back as much as I’d like. I missed Chewbacchus and Krewe de Vieux, and I’ll miss more parades before Kechi and I make it back to lodge and party with friends for the tail end of the festivities, but my thoughts are never far from the city. It’s where I became a man, where I learned to write, where I met and married the love of my life. It will also be where I spread my late brother Brandon’s ashes. We visited New Orleans together on a whim in September of 2003, and we’ve never truly left. I hope I never will.

Check out the Libre book release here, and buy Skye’s collection here. They will not disappoint!