Most of Mahogany Browne’s Chrome Valley reads like an origin story. She’s from Oakland. She grew up with Redbone. And she and Bam have had a child together. The book feels like those bildungsroman that tell the story of place. Or background. And in Browne’s case, the poems are couched as both her individual origin story and the origin story common to many Black women in the United States. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Joshua Bennett’s ‣, in its consideration of the generalized Black experience, but also how the poet’s experience uniquely lives through her being part of that generalized experience. In fact, this negotiation is one of the central points to Browne’s book. That sense that in America “this is just how it is” as her poems relate a series of personal stories that validate, particularize, and complicate the truth to these cultural observations.
But, in fact, Browne’s book isn’t so much about origins as it is love. What love is shaped like for her. How love ends up more as a navigation than it does an occupation. Bam could be the love of her life. Except that Bam is more a pattern of behaviors rather than a man interested in the sustained nature of loving relationships. Or maybe the Black men the poet is drawn to are patterns she learned about from her mother, Redbone. How Redbone loved men is how the poet loves men now. And what’s the origin of this intoxicating cycle in both of them.
Significantly, however, the poems aren’t just about telling stories. They’re about giving the stories a voice that sounds out their significance. There was this time I was invited to help rehearse for a play. The part was for a Black man. And the playwright had made clear to me that I could be helpful and read the part during rehearsals. But the performance would need a Black man. And I understood the situation. Because I couldn’t vocalize the part. I couldn’t be that presence on stage. When the play was performed, and I was in the audience, I could clearly hear how that character’s voice came from a place informed by the Black experience. What I experience reading Browne’s book is a degree of remove. Browne’s identity and life experience weave into the tenor and form of language, shifting between spoken language and language that conventionally exists on the page. Leaving me, the reader, to experience it as observation. I can hear the story. I can read the poems out loud to bring them closer to vocalization. But I don’t deliver the poems the way the poem on the page asks for it to be delivered. And that delivery is a significant part of Browne’s book.
It’s in this state that I read Browne’s poems as a caution against love. Because there is a way love can sublime the world. It can unfold the world, like watching a dance troupe shape itself into a flower blooming. The dancer are both human bodies in movement and the actual flower laid on top of them. Love for the poet has this beauty, but there is a general understanding that every woman appearing in the book is in a dangerous proposition. An irresistible proposition. Love can’t not be what changes everything. And it can’t be trusted. The Black men who are too familiar to the poet and her family arrive like walking threats. They stand at the corner house asking if any woman passing will come by that night. They ask a daughter to drive them to their mistress’s house. There is no end to their hapless villainy. The men’s oblivious pursuit of whatever might satisfy their desire. Do the men think this is the extent of love? The book doesn’t speculate on that. It dwells instead on the paradox of a woman’s desires, her knowing the risk of those desires, her wishing there wasn’t so much on the line for just wanting her desires to be satisfied. Is there an origin to this kind of love story? That’s the question at the center of Browne’s book.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.