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
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.
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
In language streaked “with freaks / who all freak in physical verbatim,” Palm-Lined with Potience is the real deal, conjuring and deconstructing a lyric city under the M train, in the shadow of World Trade and in broad daylight—an x-ray on all that teems “with big time to rot” in an otherwise sanitized NYC.
Daniel Poppick
Seeing itself as an anonymous insider between the ecologies and effigies of the cityscape, [Allen’s] writing moves through tunnels and across horizons as though it has hitched a ride between the cars of a train. The revolution does begin in the sensual innocence of child’s play and it strikes me that this book is an affirmation of poetry’s great call: do not decrypt those hints scrawled overnight underneath the bridges but let them be echoic
Valerie Hsiung
In Palm-Lined with Potience, language functions as aperture, dilating between light and shadow, soft intimacy and wide-open exposure. Written on “both sides of silence” and through ecosystems of fierce tenderness, faith, chance, and survival, Palm-Lined with Potience promises “to love you no matter which side of the wishbone breaks in your little palm.” This is poetic chiromancy to live by.
Kim Rosenfield
ISBN: 978-1-946433-89-3
Trade Paperback
98 pp, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: May 15 2025