It was once said that a writer is not one person but many people attempting to be one person, and within Sean DesVignes’ suite of poems “Previously Unreleased Screams” this chorus of selves is executed masterfully. DesVignes’ personas translate the self into a series of notes, leaps of lyric as jampacked as a concert where we may all praise in the same language, each word as joyous a friction on the skin as sweat praying to the ground “Where / there was no way of / knowing one’s wet / from another’s.” DesVignes slips into these personas seemingly effortlessly as the musicality of his forebear Gwendolyn Brooks’ classic poem “We Real Cool” seaps into the mouth and knows how to make each echo distinct, language deeply aware “a breath that doesn’t end / in sound is a failed form / of begging.”
I read these poems and in being surrounded by the voices of such overshadowed genius I find again and again the songs that make me more myself. These poems, defined by the funk native to an enjambment deployed with surgical precision demand not just a keen eye but for the ear to expand so that we might hold a trained scream, a generation’s worth of singing. Here the breath is not just the breath, not even just the wind, but the famous fists of Sugar Ray Robinson, 160 pounds of a jab and then another with each line. What waits for us around each corner in these poems? How could we know the true anatomy of a note until DesVignes signs off “the sternum weakens like a chin / the mouth widens like a lung.”