Barrelhouse Reviews: A Gospel of Bones, by Suzi Q. Smith

Review by Alex Carrigan

Alternating Current Press / February 2021 / 106 pages

In her debut poetry collection, writer, activist, and educator Suzi Q. Smith composes a series of poems that form her own gospel. The collection features a wide variety of events and influences that Smith uses to provide commentary on subjects like Black biracial womanhood, poverty, and violence.

At times, Smith’s gospel seems to ask the reader to read these poems from a different method or point of view. Some pieces, like “We Pay Cash For Houses” and “Clumsy-Tongued Lovers,” require multiple reads due to Smith’s usage of contrapuntal poetry. For example, the former poem runs:

Front yards with grass,                                               Fresh cut,
old trees and shiny crab apples                               clean as first-day-of-school sneakers
liquor stores here got bulletproof glass                even the mirrors finesse
the churches, tattered lighthouses                         the new banks on the blocks
hold all our secrets                                                      bundles of snow plunder

[apologies to the poet for internet formatting -ed.]

Others, like “Aquemini: A Gospel,” weave Smith’s text with lyrics from OutKast and the Biblical tale of David. It’s useful to listen to Aquemini while reading this poem, as it helps with atmosphere and appreciating the fusion of Smith’s poetry and the Atlanta group’s lyrics (“I am not his wife anymore. / I am my mother’s smallness, my grandmother’s dutiful religion. / Shake that load off, shake that load off”).

In some of the longer, multipart poems, Smith especially shines. In a crown of sonnets, “This Crown Crooked Anyways,” Smith connects subjects like poverty, crime, Blackness, and faith across decades of memories and experiences. These begin with childhood moments like learning about the rapture in Sunday school and proceed to her cousin’s incarceration and the birth of her daughter (“When I packed our daughter’s tiny clothes quietly / no one applauded the grace of my departure, / spoke north and south of our unkeyed journey, though once / we were so in love, we watered our hope with sweat”).

Of course, while many of the poems are gospel-like in their delivery of the speaker’s truths, Smith demonstrates that the gospel can be used to deliver anger and to rebuke minor and major acts of discrimination. The poem “For Cedric,” for example, is written toward a former white classmate who made a callous comment about a friend of the speaker’s who was shot by police. Speaking to “Michelle,” Smith calls out one-dimensional thinking by offering memories of Cedric beyond this single event (“Michelle, you never saw Cedric smile. / You never tried to beat him in a foot race. / You never wept or prayed for him”) and ends by asking “Michelle, what do you teach your babies? / Michelle, do you know what a victim is? Do they always look / like you?”

The final piece in the collection, “Black Rage in Four-Part Harmony,” is a four-part poem where Smith unleashes some of the bluntest, most critical, and most memorable lines in the collection. Initially, the speaker explains that she is still othered and seen as a threat by some while others see her as approachable and friendly. The second part talks of the challenges and perceptions she faced growing up biracial (“I tell her that most white people / only want me white / when they want to win an argument”). Part Three contains a series of questions from a non-Black voice speaking dismissively, with horrifying historical undertones (“Why you can’t just / swallow stones / ‘til you stop being hungry?”) and the final, most haunting part begins by proclaiming “There are three basic ways to make a noose.”

A Gospel of Bones is a fascinating poetic manifesto that firmly establishes Smith as a must-read author. The collection takes on many familiar subjects, but Smith’s poetic lens presents them in a layered and unique manner. It’s a work that’s worth reexamining in different settings, moods, and contexts. Each read reveals something new that could have slipped by before, unveiling just how perceptive Smith is. She attempts to allow ideas to take root in the reader’s mind after the sermon ends.  

Alex Carrigan (@carriganak) is an editor, writer, and critic from Virginia. He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Empty Mirror, Gertrude Press, Quarterly West, Whale Road Review, Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019), Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia Press, 2020), and ImageOutWrite Vol. 9.