in the vanguard of my owned
blackness ❍ I am the air
off the many so year-ago trees
that be the prettiest is of all
having been so here before
the dear darkness
dear darkness: needed weight
to wind and the goosebump too
I lay beneath your time
where exhaled breath
does not bereave its body
when it moves
for it knows to continue
into wind and all
without needing to ask
light for permissions
I truly have rarely encountered such a singular debut.
Terrance Hayes
Palm-Lined with Potience is New York City poet and visual artist Basie Allen’s debut collection of poems. Basie’s work is by turns political and lyrical, charting both physical and emotional landscapes, making maps of paintings and paintings of maps. While rooted in Pro-Black theory, art, and precise description, Basie makes space in the ekphrastic for the eerie and abstract. The poems in this collection search for nodes of truth in a tumultuous sea of fractured facts.
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Basie Allen is a poet and visual artist from New York City’s Lower East Side. His work carves parentheses in-between dirt and feeling. In 2020 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Psychic Cartography” is included in MoMA/P.S.1’s Homeroom series of online publications.
Basie Allen is a true new New York School Poet. Or better: a BKNY School Poet raised on the Popeyes on Atlantic Avenue, DMX subway elegies, Rocawear, Baudelaire, and “Cy Twomblylylylylylyly shadows.” This poet handles language like a painter. This poet handles language as Richard Pryor would have if he’d made his living writing poems. Palm-Lined with Potience is amazing. I truly have rarely encountered such a singular debut. Basie Allen is the truth.
Terrance Hayes
Basie Allen's poems reside in that place that asks, as he says, to be read "somewhere in between the idea of Rocawear and Baudelaire," a place crowded with resonances and references. Colliding registers and vernaculars so that a line unfolds utterly unexpectedly, sometimes slipping up the conventions of noun and verb, the reader is left with a hiccup that feels like a heartbreak. The sudden swoosh of no rug beneath the feet/feat of language. There is humor, honesty, a notable absence of ironic smirkage. A warmth and a zig zag, a sway in the way of saying. The power of Allen's descriptive phrases is in their precision, a sense of commitment to contour, internal curvature. Worshipful and winking devotion to the work of carving and refining, shaving away at the thing until it reveals the form it wants to, needs to, take. Pigment, poignant, photographic, painterly. Sculptural. These verses both welcome and wrestle with a Black poetics in all the many realms it inhabits and dislocates, cityscape as nature poem. Feelingscape as nature poem. Concrete poetry with an intimate understanding of concrete, the lifetime study of being a city kid. Transported, transportive tongues of verse.
Alex Tatarsky
ISBN: 978-1-946433-89-3
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 104 pp, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: March 15 2022
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)