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• W4206325677 abstract "Reviewed by: Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs Tyler Smith (bio) Michael Kleber-Diggs. Worldly Things. Milkweed Editions. Michael Kleber-Diggs is a Kansas Jayhawk turned Minnesota Gopher. He’s also a law college graduate turned poet. Having spent many years in the corporate world, he devotes a great deal of his time these days to teaching creative writing to high school students and as an instructor in the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. If that weren’t enough, he’s also an African American trying to navigate the complex reality of living in a racialized world. Winner of the Milkweed Editions Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Kleber-Diggs’s debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, holds many of these personal experiences in conversation. Specifically, it has its readers bear witness to the many recent and violent transgressions carried out against Black lives by police brutality, especially within the poet’s home state of Minnesota. Also, it calls to its refrain the names of Philando Castile and George Floyd, among so many others. The book is a daring one that operates within the bounds of the everyday and the fraught vector of a racist society. Worldly Things opens with the simple and ordinary act of a father picking up his daughter from school. The promise of the day’s “attractive afternoon” quickly fades when our poet witnesses the distressing sight of a “Black boy in the back-seat of a cop car / across the street from [his] daughter’s jr. high.” What follows is the speaker’s rumination on his and the boy’s cultural and class distinctions, noting that: “. . . among the thriving” and “on the best block in the city . . . I have / friends who live nearby so I’m sure I fit right / in with the rich folks and professors. But him?” Here, the poem lingers on the question of the boy’s belonging, on issues of race, and privilege: He’s barely surviving the day, and looks at mefrom his sick situation as if to say: Fuck your pity! Canary in the coalmine, negro in the pipeline,his life is full of cages. He’s in the wrong system too soon—tragedies intertwining. [End Page 169] The speaker points out the situation to his daughter, and she reveals the boy’s name is Felix and that “He’s pretty cool. Sometimes he can be mean,” and that “I think he’s on probation.” However, due to her youthful innocence, or perhaps the regularity of the police’s presence at her school, the truth seems altogether lost on her. It is in the reflective eyes of the father that we see the severity of the situation: “In the rearview mirror, I meet my own // targeted skin and sigh. I’m angry, chagrined.” Often, the simple act of the routine finds itself unsettled by race and racism, which is evident in the poem “Superman and My Brother, Spiderman and Me.” Here, the speaker envisions himself as a child again, except now he occupies the liminal spaces of childhood’s kindlier geography and the harsher prospect of adulthood, where race and inequality subsume the social landscapes: . . . Even then, black boys were shot in parks playing games children play. So, when we turnedeight, instead of squirt guns, we got puffy superhero heads that sprayed water from their mouths when we pulled the trigger.We delighted in comic-book legends spitting on our friends at our behest. It was white boys on the block with their pistolsand revolvers that always shot harder and farther, against Superman and my brother, Spiderman and me. A fissure cuts across the poem, hinting at the potential dangers to come of “white boys on the block with their pistols”: One month before our birthday, our father was shotand killed in his office. He was a dentist. I tell you that for a reason. I use educated and middle-class for a reason.I don’t want you to think our Dad had it coming. While this book lingers with the violences and transgressions that have continually befallen Black lives, it would be unfair to characterize Worldly Things as a book solely reflective of that loss and grief..." @default.
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• W4206325677 date "2021-01-01" @default.
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• W4206325677 title "Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs" @default.
• W4206325677 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/psg.2021.0068" @default.
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