Barrelhouse Reviews: Freedom House by KB Brookins
Reviewed by Raye Hendrix
Deep Vellum / June 2023 / 120 pp
The prefatory poem of Freedom House, “Black Life Circa 2029,” begins the work of resistance by imagining a future in which Blackness is allowed not only to survive, but thrive. In this poem, KB Brookins deconstructs the struggles brought about by systemic inequality—domestic abuse, police violence, income inequality and gentrification, and racial profiling—and rebuilds a new Black life via syntax that forces readers—especially white readers—to confront the ways in which we hold on to stereotypes. For example, the line “The hood walks me, & sometimes, I walk it back” pivots immediately into a description: “The hood is a small utopia of green grass.” Brookins knows what images “the hood” conjures, and they let us conjure them for a moment before showing us we’re wrong. In this imagined future, “the hood” is a “small utopia” where “there are no police,” even when “The Black boy shoots a toy gun.” In 2029, Brookins writes, “Handcuffs exist only for the filthiest / of kink shit; I don’t have to call in Black the next day.”
“Black Life Circa 2029” opens with a “spacious, carpeted living room” and ends with the speaker proclaiming, “I have a living— / I have a room.” This room acts as a front porch, or perhaps a welcome mat, which propels us into the Freedom House’s “Foyer” (or first section). Less imagined, more present and painful, but no less full of joy, the poems in “Foyer” introduce the reader to the speaker’s gender transition journey and the complications of transitioning while Black in Texas. This complexity begins in the section’s opening poem, “KB’s Origin Story,” where the speaker is both “a weary son” and “a drury daughter,” and develops as we move deeper into the “house.” In “T Shot #1,” for example, Brookins navigates the physical struggles of the transition process as well as the internal euphoria: “Even if / the bruise turns blue & creates a pretty palace on my skin,” Brookins writes, “on the other side of that flesh wall I am becoming / my own best man.” Moving through the Foyer, the poems repeatedly confront the reader with a strange binary of pain and joy: dysphoria and sexting at the gynecologist, the shame and delight in top surgery scars, shaving away the first traces of a beard for the sake of a grandmother’s love. Brookins explores these complications without granting them neat resolutions, and asks us to keep walking, move forward, and not to leave our discomfort at the door.
While the collection as a whole is engaged with our social and political moment, the poems in the second section, “Dining Room” are more overt. These are the poems that white people don’t talk about with their families at Thanksgiving unless they want to ruin dinner, making “Dining Room” an apt name for this section.
Brookins pulls no punches here. The first poem, in which the speaker “listen[s] to a Black girl / take her last breath / in a struggle between police / & history,” immediately locates us in a space named plainly in the poem’s final word: “rage.” The remaining poems in this section are similarly blunt; in the Dining Room, we are sitting around a table, having difficult but necessary conversations. In “Bare Minimum, Or To-Do List For White America,” Brookins makes commands with both love and justified anger. Demands for self-healing and care like “Seek therapy” and “Don’t kill the creative in you” sit alongside blunt orders against racial violence: “Don’t kill black people,” “don’t kill Asian women,” “Get a job— / one that doesn’t make you / a dictator / […] one that doesn’t require blood from me.” Those commands ring in all the poems of this section even when not literally spoken, even in tongue-in-cheek moments of humor. “Curriculum Vitae” speaks to the violence and discrimination Black and trans people face not just in person, but on paper. The poem takes the form of a resume or CV, and lists KB’s pronouns as “whatever will get me the job,” their education as “Blackness, 1995-present” and “Trans-exclusionary high school 2009-2013,” and qualifications like “Lifetime achievement in most tokenable” and a position as the “Co-Chair” of the “Committee of Black people Who Survived.” KB doesn’t shy away from despair in these poems—over the climate crisis, presidential elections, white supremacy, police brutality, and the rise of capitalist fascism—but that despair is never allowed to win. The Dining Room is where we cry and hurt, but it’s also where we fight.
The final two sections, “Bedroom” and “Living Room,” don’t let up that fight, but continue from a space of greater interiority and intimacy. In these sections, we travel deep within the House, beyond the introductions of the Foyer and Dining Room’s rage, and get to know the speaker not without the anger, but in addition to it. Beginning in “Bedroom,” these poems plumb new depths of the speaker’s psyche, and even implicate the speaker themself: “I’ve done unspeakable things & here I am, / telling you so you can get on with it.” These poems blend—or perhaps reveal—the political and confessional, highlighting the existential fatigue that resistance and Resistance leave in their wake: “When I care myself / to tears; that’s when I feel my most human. / […] What do we do when caring / is a danger to yourself and others.” In the Bedroom, even quiet moments with a lover prove subject to intrusive thoughts of “the cop car yelling ‘be afraid’.” But like the living room in the collection’s opening poem, the poems in the “Living Room” section bring us back to hope.
The journey through Freedom House begins and ends with imagining. The final section, though still fraught with the realities of Black trans life in America, is also brimming with joy. Unlike “Black Life Circa 2029,” though, that joy does not exist in the future, but now. Celebration and praise occur amid strife in these final poems: praise for mimosas, dancing, Spotify, “studs-turned-bois in crop tops,” drag queens, queer folks of all shapes and sizes. This is the crux of Brookins’ resistance: to find beauty during the fight as well as beyond it; to acknowledge that imagining is good, but having is better. To occupy Freedom House is to do the difficult and delightful work of living that pulls the dream of tomorrow closer and closer to today.
Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. Her debut poetry collection, What Good Is Heaven, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press as their Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series selection for Alabama (2024). Also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Raye is the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and the Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review, 2018). Their poems appear in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Poet Lore, and others. Raye is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon and an editor at Press Pause Press and DIS/CONNECT: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press). For more, visit rayehendrix.com.