“I’m Al Filreis and this is PoemTalk at the Writers’ House,“ began the host, as he always did with the long-running podcast. This late November day was special, though. “It’s Evie Day!” Sitting beside Filreis at the table were three poet-scholars who’ve often joined him for in-depth poetry discussions over the last 18 years: Aldon Lynn Nielsen, William “Billie Joe” Harris, and the late Tyrone Williams. The special guest for the podcast’s 200th episode, Evie Shockley, sat on the far end in black pants and a pink sweater, having arrived at the Kelly Writers’ House on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus minutes before the event began. She wore a bright smile and laughed easily, chatting with these old friends about her poetry.

The poet under discussion on PoemTalk, a podcast created by Filreis in partnership with PennSound and the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, isn’t usually in attendance. Shockley is a friend of the Writers’ House, though, as Director of the Creative Writing program at Rutgers-New Brunswick. Her collection from Wesleyan University Press, suddenly we, had gained significant buzz as a finalist for the National Book Award earlier in the month. Later that afternoon, there would be a private discussion recorded with the same cast. Afterward, a public reading from Shockley’s latest collection, sharing the spotlight with poet and Penn professor, Simone White.

I’d recently completed my first year as a participant of ModPo, the nickname for a massive open online course run by Penn. After spending the last several years of disabled life trying to approximate a literary education on my own, a free course called “Modern & Contemporary American Poetry” provided by an Ivy League university seemed perfect.

My writing life began with poems as a neurodivergent adolescent trying to process outsized emotions. I’d left poetry behind in favor of fiction in my twenties, but I thought revisiting modern poetry might improve my creative nonfiction and short story attempts. My enthusiasm for the course and the material was clear to Filreis and poet, professor, and ModPo Administrator, Laynie Browne. They invited me to be a Community Teaching Assistant next fall. I wasn’t waiting, though. I’d registered to attend this special in-person recording of PoemTalk, many episodes of which are featured in the course.

The poet-scholars discussed and analyzed “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Shockley’s 2018 collection, semiautomatic, and “my last modernist poem #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from her 2012 book, the new black. The episode is a great introduction to her work— Shockley discusses her poetry with colleagues and friends who appreciate its literary and historical themes.

After the episode recording ended, Filreis asked if I wanted to sit in the booth during the podcast recording for PennSound. I happily agreed to return in a few hours.

Suddenly Here All Along: On Evie Shockley’s suddenly we

Shockley’s latest book, suddenly we, follows her previous critically acclaimed collections in style. The poems in this book engage in the same skillful wordplay, using parentheses and a range of other syntactical tricks to enhance ambiguity and deepen meaning. As in Shockley’s earlier collections, the poems here explore the experience of Black Americans, both now and throughout their history. The title’s “suddenly” is an ironic wink at the fact that some people paint Black achievements and travails as recent developments. My own first encounter with Shockley’s poetry came from reading a book that highlights just how long it’s been, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Shockley’s poem, “no car for colored [+] ladies (or, miss wells goes off [on] the rails)”, was included in the award-winning and illuminating work.

With suddenly we, Shockley continues her work of telling terrible truths with a wink, a smile, and plenty of wordplay to keep the message smooth like jazz. In person, Shockley seems like the playful speaker of “prefixed”. That poem’s epigraph explains how the English prefix “eu-” comes from a combination of the Greek morphemes for “good” and “well.” The speaker goes on to question the consequences of words, punctuating each couplet with a penultimate “eu-” word, before ending with a witty challenge: “language has baggage—but the good news is art can renew / & resee it. I spread the word, poetry’s ev(ie)angelist. you?”

Enrolled in Catholic schools in the suburbs, I rarely met people of color until I went to work after getting my GED in 1999. Though I’ve had Black coworkers and friends in adulthood, I’ve always relied on great literature for glimpses of other peoples’ lived experiences. While Black feminist poetry is new to me, I count Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and Jesmyn Ward among my favorite novelists because they introduced me to unfamiliar worlds with beautiful words. Worlds that I feel compelled to reckon with because of inequalities that I can’t ignore. I feel that familiar energy and longing for justice from Shockley’s first line to her last.

The collection is dedicated to Cheryl A. Wall, described as “mentor and friend, professor of black feminist truth and beauty.” Shockley notes that Wall was “among the scholars who began in the 1970s and ‘80s to introduce and institutionalize the African American literary tradition.” Wall “made her transition”—Shockley’s preferred verbiage for death—in April 2020. She passed three months before retirement. Shockley continues her legacy as the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

The poet expresses her admiration elegantly in “blues-elegy for cheryl”, a tribute to her mentor. After her speaker alliterates that Cheryl “spent years sowing seeds of study,” the fourth tercet continues,

she weeded our mothers’ gardens with tender loving care

tended hurston & cade & morrison (&&&!) all with loving care

our daughters won’t have to search hard for the bounty there.

The collection is filled with literary and historical references like these, alluding to the legacies of Black feminist writers. While free and experimental verse abounds, Shockley doesn’t completely eschew tradition. As the title suggests, her elegy draws on blues traditions. The poetic form uses tercets in a recurring pattern: line one gives a statement, line two adds a variation to line one, and line three provides a conclusive observation. Using the same word to end the first two lines and a rhyming last word for line three creates a certain musicality, even on the page.

The poet similarly evokes African American literary and cultural tradition in new poems like “holla”, a shout-out to respected Black civil rights figures who’ve transitioned to the next life. The poem invokes a range of cultural heroes including Tupac Shakur, Harriet Tubman, Ella Fitzgerald, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Prince. Imagining what Malcolm X would have done if he’d found the afterlife disappointing, the speaker paraphrases Virgil’s famous opening,

a voice carrying 30-odd years of hell-no

and 3 continents of you-gots-to-be-

kidding-me would be all SING, MUSE

OF THE WRATH OF PHYLLIS, pentameting

all over your i-ams.

That wrath invokes the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, another of Shockley’s literary heroes. She uses these historical allusions to great effect, infusing her lines with their spirit to create something new.

In the poem “brava gente”— Italian for “good people”— Shockley pays tribute to “all the many chroniclers of movement(s)”, including ten chroniclers named at the end. The poem addresses the mass migration of people of color into Eurocentric societies, its title invoking Italy’s relations with refugees from war-torn North Africa. The speaker tells of her own story, influenced by the Great Migration of the early twentieth century, when Black Americans fled the South in great numbers hoping for a better life. She relates to the diasporic chroniclers of today:

all of you were some of us, at one time or another

history holds the long threads that trail from your heels,

         leading back to the origins of your origins

The lines hope for a future in which refugees and migrants are aided by their predecessors in resisting the persecution of governmental systems that mistreat these marginalized communities.

Shockley also calls out disenfranchisement efforts in suddenly we, deploying her keen awareness of Black feminist history. The poem “women’s voting rights at one hundred (but who’s counting?)” references the struggles of Ida B. Wells, whose white suffragette “sisters” tried to keep her dark skin hidden during the 1913 campaign for women’s voting rights. The speaker then brings us forward in time with the couplet, “one-mississippi / two-mississippis”, an allusion to the competing slates of electors during the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The next stanza continues this thought:

one vote was all fannie lou

hamer wanted. in 1962, when

her constitutional right was

over forty years old, she tried

to register.

The speaker goes on to mention the results of Hamer’s campaign to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (a slate that wasn’t all-white): she was hassled, fired, evicted, and shot at. The poem draws a line from 1913 through 1962 and on to Stacie Abrams’ loss in the Georgia governor’s race in 2018. Its speaker seems to ask, Will it ever be more than words? Abrams rolled out plans to fix voting rights after that loss, after all, but “it’s been two years—& counting”. Recalling the competing electors in certain states during the 2020 election, the theme resonates through to today with a new presidential race looming.

Shockley continues in a political vein with “fire works”— a poem about the first celebration of Juneteenth as a national holiday in 2021. The speaker recalls how the previous summer, during the George Floyd protests, the explosions weren’t so celebratory, as police broke up protests with force and arrests,

reminding us all that patrollers

         still roam the streets in search

of black folks on the loose

Sadly, these lines could allude to much of America’s history, from slavery through lynchings and Jim Crow into modern mass incarceration. The speaker is clear that there is plenty left to do and that declaring a national holiday just reminds them of,

the release that came to texas

          more than two years after two

centuries too late. the struggle

          continues—so we get fired up.

The first three lines are a reference to June 19th’s mythology as the date when the last enslaved persons— in Galveston, Texas— found out about the Emancipation Proclamation, two years after Lincoln had invoked it as a war measure. I feel Shockley’s frustration with the continuing fight for true freedom for Black people in the United States on every page. As a longtime activist, it’s a frustration that I share.

I am a straight, white man who comes from good family circumstances, but I’m also neurodivergent and medically disabled. My health forced me to stop working in 2013 after a decade of on-and-off phone work in customer service and tech support. My entry into serious writing came from fighting for the medical cannabis that I needed. As someone with Tourette’s Syndrome, chronic headaches, and related psychological disorders, cannabis helps me avoid an otherwise inevitable addiction to opiates. Seeing the lies of cannabis prohibition firsthand made it clear to me how vital it is to speak out against all injustice.

I started connecting with activist groups and launched The Cannabis Salvation Blog, an activist website, in 2013. With the help of two friends, I moved to Denver, Colorado for eight months in 2014 to write about the beginning of legal cannabis sales in the U.S. and to medicate legally. Though my health often precludes physical protest, I consider fair and honest reporting to be a satisfying contribution. It didn’t take long to see that people of color suffer most from the drug war, linking it with other social justice causes like ending mass incarceration and police violence toward Black Americans.

My experiences gave me an added appreciation for the alternate title of “breonna taylor’s final rest”, which assures that “the furies are still activists”. The poem paints a visceral portrait of the nightmare that Breonna Taylor woke to when police stormed her house looking for her boyfriend, ultimately killing the unarmed Black woman while executing an early-morning no-knock drug warrant.

Though none have been held accountable for Taylor’s death to date, Shockley’s speaker imagines that the Ancient Greek fury known for hounding perpetrators of homicides will secure vengeance. It asks, with sly homonymic allusions,

is part of what

makes us so furious the fact that the same bloody

forces that blue your            life to shreds are still free

to deliver their next bouquet of violents? breonna, rest

assured, tisiphone will help us hunt your justice down.

Readers who enjoy visual poetry will appreciate “alma’s arkestral vision (or, farther out)”, a poem in nine sections over as many pages. Shockley’s speaker begins the book with the word “WE” in large letters composed entirely of the word, “you”. As with many in the collection, this poem is ekphrastic, not only being visually pleasing, but engaging with art that moved the poet. This one is based on Alma Woodsey Thomas’s abstract painting “Starry Nights and the astronauts” (1972). The poem plays with phonetic ambiguity, as in section IV with,

or have i mist

                      ache

                              in

your stern look

for a backwards glance

Shockley also uses ekphrasis in “perched”, inspired by Alison Saar’s sculpture, “Blue Bird,” a picture of which graces the book’s cover. The speaker describes the little Black girl made of bronze in a room that’s vacant, but for the wooden chair on which she sits. The girl’s hair shoots wildly to the right until it morphs into branches, on one of which sits a small, blue bird. The speaker identifies with the little girl,

my dangling toes take the rest

the rest of my body refuses, spine upright,

my pose proposes anticipation. i poise

in copper-colored tension, intent on

manifesting

The collection also plays with form in poems like “umbra’s ell”, where Shockley pays tribute to those who paved the way for such divergence. Umbra was a group of Black poets, musicians, and artists founded in 1962, preceding the Black Arts Movement. With the same sense of formal creativity, the poem features one large “L”, surrounded by hand-written text using that L as a mesostic word in lines like “[L]loyd addison’s body rhythm erect in the penumbral field” and “archie shepp’s free / jazz-p[L]ayed off”. The poem ends with a few lines that don’t connect, engaging the ambiguity of the word umbra (Greek, shadow) in her wordplay to imply a safety in tradition:

shadow over me

catching rain

catching hell

i stand protected

Shockley gets more personal with her pandemic poems, including “an inoculation against innocence”. This poem, written in response to an anthology invite, serves as a snapshot of how the poet felt during the period noted in an epigraph, “29 march—20 april, 2020”. Shockley notes that she wrote it knowing it was too early to speak with authority. The lines instead capture the confusion, fear, and suspicion of those early days, with a deadly virus and no known treatment.

A similar feeling of unpleasant reminiscence is evoked by “one foot out of the panorama”. This poem captures the settling in of COVID as a part of daily life. An endnote explains the word “panorama” simply: “We all got tired of the word ‘pandemic,’ didn’t we?” The poem’s form is more ragged than the two-columned “inoculation”, with scattered fragments strewn over the page telling of “reading the nytimes like tea leaves'' and “breathing the park air with strangers.” The words recall our fear of the quotidian in those deadly days and the forms mirror how we were: separated into columns, six feet apart, then later with deaths continuing and ragged nerves, all over the place.

Shockley uses the repetitive pantoum form to address how the pandemic intersected with social justice issues in “pantoum:2020”. The line “a march in isolation becomes a summer of marches.” morphs into “a march of isolation becomes a summer of protests.” in the next stanza. The following stanza alludes to George Floyd, the Native Indian genocide, and anti-Asian bigotry,

evidence of injustice emptying or filling our lungs.

                     coronavirus burns through the navajo nation.

          under knees or on ventilators: i can’t breathe.

                                chinatowns excised with breathtaking violence.

The question that begins the poem, “who could have predicted this?” is answered in the last line, noting how we failed to meet the moment we saw coming: “we could have predicted this.   we did.”

While the new collection didn’t win the National Book Award, it continues to attract awards attention. In March, suddenly we won Shockley her first NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry.

***

As I sat in the sound booth of the Kelly Writers House, listening to a conversation between the five poetry scholars recorded for PennSound, I recalled my late twenties. Some nights, I would drive into the city straight from work to see great authors like T. C. Boyle, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Toni Morrison, herself, at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Though I’d gotten many books signed at readings, watching Filreis discuss Shockley’s work with her in the next room was a new high.

After the tape stopped rolling, the five sat around the table relaxing and discussing poetry, old friends, and old times. Filreis, who knew of my growing interest in contemporary poetry, kindly invited me in to join them. For an hour, I got to chat with great poets and scholars, relaxing before the public reading. Shockley spoke of her Tennessee roots. I listened as the scholars discussed great African American poets of the past whom they knew like Lorenzo Thomas and Amiri Baraka as well as active poets, and friends, like Rae Armantrout and Harryette Mullen, the latter a 2024 Kelly Writers House Fellow.

As Shockley began to get her poems in order for the reading, I mentioned that this would be my first live poetry reading. While I’d been to fiction readings, when I heard “poetry reading,” I told her, I always thought of coffee houses and bad verse.

“That’s open mic poetry,” Shockley replied with a smile. “You’re in for a real treat tonight.”

She was right.

In front of a crowd of 40-50 guests, poet and Assistant Professor of English at Penn, Simone White, gave a reading of some of her latest work. It was an intimate gathering in a room broadcasting a livestream, with a single podium where the table of scholars had been earlier. The reading had already lived up to my expectations, but it was about to surpass them. As the crowd finished applauding White, Shockley stepped up to the podium.

If you’ve never heard Evie Shockley read her poetry, it’s an experience I’d recommend. Hearing the lines in her own voice is the difference between reading a speech by Malcolm X and actually being in the room to hear the passion behind the man’s words. Yet while Shockley’s message is raw and echoes social justice champions, her delivery is anything but harsh or preaching. She began by singing some of the quoted lyrics in suddenly we’s epigraph. Shockley conveys a power behind her words that is at once historical, spiritual, and artistic.

One of the poems that moved me when read aloud was “can’t unsee”, which addresses the systemic horrors of Black life in the United States,

you can’t unkill. and you can’t

unjail. the constitution doesn’t

yet confer on us the right to not

have to think about this shit.

After the reading and a small reception, I walked back to my car, already beginning this essay in my head. The same passion Shockley showed at the events comes through on every page of suddenly we. Readers don’t have to strain to hear the music in these poems, but the cheery demeanor and constant wordplay never detracts from the power of lines like:

a woman is innocent until proven

angry. a man is innocent until

he fits the profile. a child is

innocent until she sees her mother

or father in cuffs. can’t unsee.

The lines evoke daily horrors that bigotry creates for Black America, the voice moving from facetious to deathly serious. This juxtaposition is present throughout the collection and the effect is delightfully jarring, like a soft wake-up call. We don’t have to be a victim of injustice to yearn for a better world.

I can’t unsee Shockley’s heartfelt reading. I can’t unhear it.

I wouldn’t want to.