Jennifer Manthey’s poetry debut, The Fight (Trio House Press, 2023), winner of the 2022 Trio Award, employs an astonishing sparseness of language alongside impeccable imagistic control—striking choices, considering the complexities driving the book. Manthey writes about systematic racism in America from the perspective of a white, interracial adoptive mother. Her stylistic choice points to a bold, if subtle, suggestion. Perhaps, uncovering the roots of our attitudes toward race demands a rigorous consideration of language itself: how might our everyday words expose, spread, and fuel toxic beliefs about racial others? And what language, if any, could counter those toxic beliefs?
Setting the scene, the book’s prologue poem, “U.S. Embassy, Kinshasa, DRC,” in which Manthey’s white, American speaker meets the Congolese woman whose baby she will have soon adopted, opens:
Black men hold the door and hold
guns. White men hold ink and stamps
behind bulletproof glass. At each
window, a vase with a single bird-
of-paradise, which is the most
tight-lipped of all the flowers.
Here, the speaker’s matter-of-fact reporting—as tight-lipped as the flowers she depicts—comes in stark contrast with the complicated fabric of the scene itself: the racially-divided system, its uneasy yet unclear power dynamics, and the looming possibility of disorder, violence. And nearly every subsequent page of The Fight exhibits this same tension: a heightened sense of stylistic control against the constant drone of race-based violence.
As we quickly move from Kinshasa to Minnesota and the predominantly Christian and white mid-America, we encounter a speaker who is as aware of the systematic racism that permeates her Black son’s new home as she is aware of her inability to ever fully protect him from it. “I make promises / which I have no words for,” she discloses in the poem, “I Circle a City Lake and Converse with Nature Like a Real Poet,” where her son is old enough to “see his Blackness next to [her] white skin.” Here is a speaker who understands the limitations of her own motherhood through the limitations of language itself: what shaky words, tenuous promises can she possibly offer her son to protect him as he grows further into himself, further within America?
The futility of this mother’s words in protecting her son becomes all the more jarring as she bravely interrogates, throughout the book, the narratives of race that she, her young son—and us too, her American readers—are inundated with and are up against. In the book’s title poem, The Fight, in which the speaker’s son gets in trouble in school after being pushed out of line (presumably by a white boy) and pushing him back, Manthey writes:
My son cries
in bed, I’m a bad boy, and I hate
America. I hate what I can’t stop
it saying to my son.
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight—as she often does through the collection—Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight. Of course, it’s a fight against racism in America: a mother’s fight to protect her Black son and a Black son’s fight against the aggression he’s destined to face across the many structures governing his young life; school, church, community picnics, as we see through these poems, are only the start. But on a deeper level, Manthey so poignantly seems to argue, it’s a fight against the stories we hold around race—those stories tragically incriminating Black boys and men that are just as tragically internalized by many of them.
In this sense, Manthey joins essential contemporaries—including Ross Gay’s essay, Some Thoughts on Mercy and Cornelius Eady’s poetry book, Brutal Imagination—as she enters the vital conversation around the corrupt racial imagination in America and further, the role language plays in it. It starts with language, Manthey seems to say; to eradicate the corrupt beliefs about Blackness and racial minorities in America, means to eradicate the problematic stories we tell about race and the equally problematic words that comprise them.
Of course, unlike Gay and Eady, Manthey is white. But whereas many white writers repeatedly choose to tread lightly around the slippery discussion of race or avoid it altogether—here is a poet who takes a commendable risk: throughout the book, we encounter a speaker for whom the interrogation of language is inherently intertwined with an interrogation of her own whiteness. In the poem, “Den i grate,” which includes an etymological diagram of the Latin-based word, Manthey writes:
Gretchen tells me the etymology of denigrate means to blacken. I sit with my tea in the sun. Hate hidden everywhere. And we are two white women in our 30s: shock of noticing.
The shock of noticing—for the speaker and very likely for readers, across their own positionalities—seems dual: we see hate hidden in the most basic (often Germanic or Latin-based) units of our everyday language, and we see the horrifying ease of continuing to use such language while remaining oblivious to its poisonous roots. Perhaps, this shock is what drives Manthey’s laconic, stingingly direct tone through much of the book: unearthing the racist seeds of our available language demands rigor, attention, and a tremendous degree of tolerance for the unease it will likely bring about.
And Manthey’s tolerance for unease while looking inward—as a white American, as an interracial adoptive mother, and as a writer, too—feels astounding. Through the book’s steadfast interrogation of what our language hides, she remains acutely aware of her own risky position, not only as a white woman but as a craftsman of words as well; how easy it is to draw on elevated forms of language—poetry, or art at large—not only to hide, but to falsely aestheticize unsettling truths. In another small, deceptively direct poem, “Referral Photograph: Baby Boy, One Month Old,” she writes:
There should be no metaphor for lack
of a mother. The blanket he is wrapped in,
flash-lightened, is a blanket.
His hands are hands,
loosely closed. His eyes are half-shut
or half-open, depending on
how you look at them. The dust-dry ground
beneath him is simply what it is: dirt.
In this purposefully unimaginative description—the blanket is just “a blanket,” the dust-dry ground is simply “dirt”—Manthey makes an aesthetic choice in service of a moral one: she refuses to beautify lack. She asks us to behold, as she does, things for what they are, be it the impoverished Democratic Republic of Congo or her son’s separation from his birth mother. And quite possibly, Manthey’s refusal to beautify lack is a way of acknowledging, if not inviting, even larger questions around power and race; how could her choice, as a white American woman adopting a Black Congolese son, not be read by some as an alarming echo of history? A global ‘trade’ has been made here, after all.
Indeed, the stakes of draping beauty over uneasy truths are even higher when we dip into a vaster, and hence more sinister, territory such as the history of race relations in America. In the book, one of the best examples of this is “Covenant”—a poem interweaving the speaker’s recollection of finding her dream family home in Minnesota with lines from a racial covenant once used against racial minorities in the state’s properties:
Radiators provide the most even heat, our
realtor told my husband.
Said restrictions and covenants
He was more skeptical of an old home than
I was.
shall run with the land
But the woodwork is gorgeous. And the
windows
and any breach of any or either
have wooden criss-crosses like hundreds of
picture frames.
thereof shall work
In the evening,
a forfeiture of title
all the windows become mirrors.
which may be enforced by re-entry.
In this contrapuntal, where the architecture of one’s American home is inevitably intertwined with a history of racism, and lines concerned with aesthetics are interjected by an ugly racist covenant, Manthey asks us to look beyond beauty and comfort and consider the true substructures underlying our nation’s fabric. To establish America as the safe and sturdy home we wish it to be, she seems to say, is to scrupulously inspect the materials it is made of, press an ungloved hand against even its moldiest beams, rotten bones.
As part of the self-examination she proposes—and while minding the risk of aestheticizing wrongs—Manthey’s speaker examines her own complicity across the intersecting positions she occupies. In the poem “Mississippi Mud,” the speaker takes a tough-minded look at an earlier fascination she and a friend had with Lorraine Gendron, a white Mississippi artist who sculpted angel-winged mud dolls in the image of Black children. “The artist began sculpting with mud because mud is free,” she writes. “Perhaps the artist reminded us of ourselves: white women pushing up from mild southern poverty.” Here, Manthey conjures a bold possibility around the risk of white saviorism and the ethics of representation. Could writing poetry as she does—just like interracial adoption—be one’s attempt to address some form of personal or spiritual poverty? Could either of these seemingly noble choices be driven, in fact, by one’s own deep-seeded lack?
But it is Manthey’s unswerving attention to language, alongside her willingness to tread the mucky waters of candid self-examination, that enables the major risks she takes to pay off. In the poem titled, “Poem I Don’t Want to Write,” she goes on to write:
I’m learning lately how little my intentions matter.
How loving someone won’t protect them from my mistakes.
Our country is broken. No,
our country works the way it was designed.
Working through our missteps around race relations with humility, courage, and an openness to self-revision—as Manthey does on a language level in these last two lines, and all throughout her book—is what she seems to wish for us, her readers, and for America. Indeed, what may resonate here for some readers is Manthey’s unassuming willingness to continue educating herself, as an adult, about the manifestations of racism in America—a reality which her son is already learning firsthand as a child. But there is also a larger, undeniable task she assumes: through the writing of these poems, she takes on the labor of educating others about racism in America—an arduous task that is often left to the Black community and other racial minorities.
Perhaps because of the unassuming tone that carries Manthey’s project forth, poems like “I Write My Son’s Birth” stand out. In this moving poem, the speaker answers her adopted son’s question, “What time was I born?” while letting herself get carried away by language. Unlike the many poems in which she proceeds with caution, here, the speaker indulges in lush, fantastical imagery, celebrating the space of the poem as an oasis of imagination and possibility:
There was notable heat, of course, humid steady breath.
The moringa reached its branches, gathered as much sky as it could.She cleaned her kitchen for your coming. Pots shined.
Spoons held each other at sounds of her pain. Knives stood brave.Impala leaped, stood on two legs; their horns blessed the doorway.
Lions came, gave their voice to you, left with tails swishing.She knew the earth beneath her. Unmoved.
Dust stirred toward bones. Blood-fight of her body.There is a way a woman is washed with birth.
Calm devotion. Not miracle.And Shala, like I said at the party, it was six a.m.
Early morning. New as you in the constant equatorial sun.
Perhaps, the tonal turn this poem marks in the book is possible because it is entirely imagined: neither the speaker nor her son have memory of the alleged event; he was a newborn, she was not there. And so, unlike the harsh American reality explored through The Fight and which merits conscientious consideration, here is an origin myth that a mother conjures for her child. And this mother’s answer, overflowing with wonder and majestic nature imagery—is more than a story provided to a son in light of cross-cultural adoption; rather, this is a mother wishing to grant her son a powerful counter-narrative to the stories of Blackness we see all over the book, and which he may encounter throughout his life. Though imagined, the majestic origin story Manthey’s speaker offers her son invokes an ancestry of kings and queens that preceded the slave trade, a way of reclaiming a dignity that history tried to strip away.
But this mother’s antidote to the corrupt racial imagination, however moving, is not entirely convincing. The impala’s ceremonial leaping, the stately swishing of the lions’ tails, and even the kitchen coming alive, all carry a heavily saccharine undertone—one that is ironically characteristic of Disney films such as The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast, two iconic American cultural productions. In this curious moment, we join Manthey’s speaker in navigating an unsettling tension: an American mother’s desperate desire to grant her child an origin story that honors his singularity on one hand, and the limitation of this mother’s own cultural imagination on the other. Once again then, Manthey points at the poverty of our American discourse when it comes to racial minorities. To allow ourselves to imagine each other more truthfully, wholly, she seems to suggest, means to radically expand our shared cultural archive; it must be reshaped to include stories of cultural “others” and minority groups.
Either way, “I Write My Son’s Birth” is a poem in which a rare mother-son intimacy emerges, an intimacy that throughout the book—we come to understand—might have been compromised at times by the speaker’s protective instinct and following terseness. In the final couplet, we encounter the only direct address the speaker makes to her son throughout the collection. Here, in the safety of the imagination-filled space, we see a mother’s desperate wish for her son to stand on his own, carry his own a name.
Jennifer Manthey’s bold debut commands readers to read and reread it, each time more attuned to the dangers and affordances of our language, and the stories we tell of others and of ourselves. And the powerful gift Manthey’s speaker gives her son is one we are given too, as both a gift and a responsibility: to resist the dangerous and fear-driven stories that surround us, threatening love. She says, it starts with language.
