Red Emma’s

A double header of poetry with Malcolm Friend presenting Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple and S. Brook Corfman presenting Luxury, Blue Lace.In Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple, Afro-Jamaican-Boricua poet, Malcolm Friend, has gifted us with a collection that is politically charged and culturally woke. Crafted in rhythmseasoned Latinx dialect, emerging from ancestral roots, replanted in the urban spectrum of hip-hop and rap, Friend’s voice is heart-inspired, soul-empowered, new-wave griot, a fearless weapon forged from South End Seattle, Puerto Rico, and Pittsburgh. Friend creates personal and family stories that connect communal tragedies and national consciousness in expressions of rage, affirmation and self-determination, confronting the brutal realities of being Black and young while caught in the colonial grip of America, enlisting the vibrations of sound masters like Ismael Rivera, Cheo Feliciano, Tato Laviera and Bob Marley. Friend chases ghosts that emerge from living scars and painful realizations experienced by people of color happening in the barbershop, the bar, the dining table, college, on the 7, in between a mofongo of jazz, blues, calypso, rumba, bomba, plena and dembow celebrations, where his heart is.— Sandra María EstevesPublishers Weekly's starred review for Luxury, Blue Lace: Relying on abstraction and the unspoken, Corfman shapes a story of unique gender experience and transformation in this extraordinary debut. The collection was chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, which is notable because Corfman sews something delicate from a similarly dreamlike fabric of longing that Siken’s Crush embodies: “There is the imaginary twin (blue) and the real twin (red), as if we can know beforehand the distinction.// We shared a face. We both tried to hide. Each named slant for a patriarch.// Dysphoria of many kinds, but some more striking than others.” Corfman crafts the poems by talking through family, domesticity, dolls, and childhood baubles. While references to transmutation, of seeking alternative embodiment, are semiobscured, the narrator elucidates via a complex juncture of both acquiescence and resistance. “There are many rooms and you suffer most when you go between them. A tendency even in language to uninhabit. But now, we know there are rooms. We know it is the going from one to the other that takes it out of you.” Like Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which Corfman references, readers may easily lose themselves in these poems’ own form of pointilism. Corfman writes from carefully detailed liminal spaces, producing a work of rare beauty and thoughtfulness.