books & Blurbs

Spoke the Dark Matter

 Blurbs: Michelle Whittaker’s Spoke the Dark Matter

“Lest we forget or lose faith in beauty’s utility in helping us navigate, or even, sometimes, if just a little bit, rattle the shitstorm, disturb the dystopic, let me point you to Michelle Whittaker’s beautiful Spoke the Dark Matter, whose impeccable, erudite, earthly and heartwrenched music— ‘I was sick with elegies,’ or, ‘Then entered a thunder within the womb / beholding me awake,’ or, ‘witnessing the last cardinal of the season / capturing the Bella moth / against the nectar in the moss’ or, ‘O layers of the land and sea. Help me.’—will remind us.” —Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights

“Spoke the Dark Matter, Michelle Whittaker’s powerful second book, connects two ‘islands’— Jamaica and Long Island—through the poet’s ancestral and ecological grounding in both locales. Whittaker’s ear is commanding in this collection: music is leitmotif and replete in the language of the poems. Her virtuosic craft is also on display in the images and stories she weaves to engage the difficult subjects on which she trains her gaze—including racism, sexism, poverty, homelessness, illness, and grief. Yet perhaps the most impressive thing about Spoke the Dark Matter is Whittaker’s rhetorical vision, manifest in wide-seeing poems that bind struggle to survival.” —Shara McCallum, author of Madwoman and No Ruined Stone

“Michelle Whittaker writes poems that are appealing for their intense scrutiny of origins, the natural world, and language. Reading this book is less an exercise in finding points of relatability but a calling forth to inhabit a rich and compelling imagination that may change how you see the world around you.” —Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022

SURGE

In the wondrous poems of Michelle Whittaker, "the tired self slipknots a song for her own self to sleep." Even as her language loops into lullabies, swells and spells, it casts a blue and uneasy shadow. Even when she meditates on art or mortality, she dazzles with a turn of phrase and explosive imagery. Even when adrift on the music and mystery of dreams, Surge is fueled by feeling. Warmth and compassion power this amazing debut. 

- Terrance Hayes - New York Times Magazine Poetry Editor

Michelle Whittaker sounds like no other poet I know: there is a wildness in her work, a strange singing from an unfamiliar depth, built of arresting imagery and turns of phrase that bend the mind. The scope of her vision is wide, as she interrogates love, the body and mortality, art, the "self" and its mutability and recesses. Whittaker's is a poetics that affirms life as much as it questions it, “consol[ing] the yes” we have no choice but to offer experience, even in darkness, even at “the edge of almost.” Surge is a startling debut from a unique and mysterious poet.

—Charif Shanahan, author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing

Until Michelle Whittaker came along, remipedes were “poison-happy” crustaceans, not metaphors for the poet’s art, not “beseechers” with fangs. Thus debuts a voice like no other and an imagination that feeds on paradox. The unbowed spirit magnifies the broken, mortal body. Cruelty and love pack into the same exoskeleton, male and female they pack. We do unspeakable things to each other, yet we create sumptuous havens, music, art, mirrors formerly known as literature, out of our “Goddamn Fire.” We are in danger. Surge just might save us, even as we drown.
—Julie Sheehan, author of  Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise

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