Rapture by Sjohnna McCray
Graywolf Press, 2016
Let Me Drown with Moses by James Goldberg
Self-published, 2015
Perhaps in our age of identity politics and intersectionality, the voices best placed to provide insight to how individual identity scales to the national are those born somehow in-between.
Sjohnna McCray was born of a Korean mother who met his father, an American GI, during the Vietnam war when she, if the poem “Bedtime Story #1” is to be taken literally, was working as a prostitute in Seoul. Father brought mother home to Ohio, and together they raised a gay poet. James Goldberg has described himself as Caucajewmexdian with a family “Jewish on one side, Sikh on the other, and Mormon in the middle.”
An early entry in Goldberg’s collection, “Ghazal (Again),” is, as its title suggests, in the form traditional to Islamic poetry, including the requisite final-stanza reference to the poet:
The altar has room, James, for both of your legs
So don’t ask for that promise on just one knee again
The collection occasionally, as here, veers near piety, but Goldberg’s characters’ longing for holiness is rarely accompanied by actual holiness. Instead, their longing is rooted in a failure to be holy, whether the speaker is a follower of Moses, Brigham Young—or a seeker today.
No matter the cultural background of these poems’ protagonists, they share a desire for betterment. Sometimes this is manifest in crass, material terms—if so, the character may find destruction. But mostly these characters long for something outside the temporal, even though the temporal, the physical, is all they truly know. Here souls reminisce of their time prior to this life upon this earth:
… if we’d known then how it tastes to dwell in earth,
we’d have bowed our heads in reverent awe
for the beauty of the delicate silt
that flows around us through these
fragile, faith-filled,
fleeting
years.
McCray’s poems, however, are much more grounded in the vulgar realities of lived life—peeping with his cousins upon a naked woman down the street, early experiences hooking up with other men, or, of course, his parents’ own seminal experiences (pun intended) that led to his own chance at a violent, sweaty, horny, dangerous, joyful life.
McCray’s speakers, who appear autobiographical in most cases, find their redemption not outside the physical, but deep within it, as in this moment of holiness at the moment before orgasm in the eponymous section of the final (and also eponymous) poem, “Rapture”:
…an old LP, a needle tracing static,
a record ready to drop.Walnuts smack on the roof.
A cardinal shakes on the line.
And still, we refuse to yield
back into being singular.
Both poets reach out from the liminal to others and for a sense of something greater, something spiritual. And whether that something spiritual is other people alone—or other people in connection with an outside force—may not matter as much as the reaching, the holding, the refusal to yield back into being singular.
Theric Jepson is a fictionist and poet whose books include Byuck and After Chadwick. He believes good criticism is a vital part of creative culture and we should all attempt it a little more often. Offline, he lives east of San Francisco; online at thmazing.com.