Demos: An American Multitude

by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

Overview

An Electric Literature “Most Anticipated Poetry Book of 2021”

From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s newest collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.

“‘You tell me how I was born   what I am,’” demands Naka-Hasebe Kingsley—of himself, of the reader, of the world. The poems of Dēmos: An American Multitude seek answers in the Haudenosaunee story of The Lake and Her children; in the scope of a .243 aimed at a pregnant doe; in the Dōgen poem jotted on a napkin by his obaasan; in a flag burning in a church parking lot. Here, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley places multiracial displacement, bridging disparate experiences with taut, percussive language that will leave readers breathless.

With astonishing formal range, Dēmos also documents the intolerance that dominates American society. What can we learn from mapping the genealogy of a violent and loud collective? How deeply do anger, violence, and oppression run in the blood? From adapted Punnett squares to Biblical epigraphs to the ghastly comment section of a local news website, Dēmos diagrams surviving America as an other-ed American—and it refuses to flinch from the forces that would see that multitude erased.

Dēmos is a resonant proclamation of identity and endurance from one of the most intriguing new voices in American letters—a voice singing “long   on America      as One / body             but many parts.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317117
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. He is the author of Colonize Me and Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot, winners and finalists of over a dozen awards. Affrilachian poet and Kundiman alum, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley is recipient of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Tickner Fellowships. His work has appeared in numerous publications such as The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNEXT, Native Voices: Honoring Indigenous Poetry, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Poetry, and Tin House. He is an assistant professor of poetry and nonfiction in Old Dominion University’s MFA program.

Read an Excerpt

Sons of Cain: Hunting a ridge between Lockwood and Sizerville State Park

“Fire,” hisses my Paw in full regalia
us two orange bulbs of florescent death
hunkering among red oak and switches
of witch hazel. I press the .243
tighter against my right shoulder
The eyepiece on its scope coring
my wide white eye juicing it down
my soft sun browned cheeks so full
of violence and the lunch of Vienna
sausages I’d upchucked secretly
behind Sweet birch or maybe Shagbark?
I’ve never been good
at IDing trees. Paw’s left eye fires
from me to the doe from me to the doe
stomach acid still tugging on the trigger
of my throat. Sweet Jesus
He’s thinking so loud I can hear the brattling
of slurs through my earplugs
Fire you little pussy. Your skin softer
than split sausage? He’ll chaw me
between them ivory dentures. He’ll
turn my hide inside out
surer than any sure thing.
I take stock of the brown doe her
bare head and pregnant belly
my crosshairs bobbing between exposed
foreleg and shoulder. If
if I breathe life
into a single bullet
dormant now in the chamber
hammer and pin it will shatter
her lungs
it will powder us in two
our most basic parts.


On the Occasion I Participated in Two Very Different Flag Burnings

2000.
We called it retiring
Old Glory, Troop 276,
us middle school boys
in our green ‘n tans
uniforms filling every concrete crease
of a United Methodist church’s
parking lot. “Under the code,”
said the Scoutmaster, “the flag,
when it is in such condition
that it is no longer a fitting symbol
for display, should be obliterated.
By burning.”
He turned to us boys with bent arms
held at weakest attention. 640
flags cast carefully over
the long iron teeth of a smoldering pit,
soft names muffled beneath the black girth
of its tongue. Fire filled our eyes,
flags dissolving like ice.

2020.
Them and Us.
Blue and Brown.
Batons and bedsheets burning red, white, &
we are scattering
in the face of weaponized Blue.
Some of us are free
to wonder about speech.
Others tongue-tossed, tied in metal infinity
symbols. Names chanted. Protestor’s lips:
Jordan Edwards. Jayson Negron. Terence Crutcher. Breonna Taylor. Atatiana Jefferson. Aura R
Our teeth are stained from talking of the deep black,
of insatiable fire pits. We wave red tongues
above the face of a tyrant, our only
recourse the soft lash of symbolic gesture.
In the parking lot, they greet us with an older glory:
with rubber bullets, with sandbags, with helmet and shield,
with enough tear gas and muzzle fire to fill our eyes,
flags dissolving in the wake of ICE.


Out My Apartment Window, West Baltimore: August, 2 A.M.

I spread the blinds
with sleepy fingers:

Three boys
and a lookout fourth
none old enough
to drive the car
they’re prowling
around:

My Marlboro
-colored sedan,
a Benz twenty-something
years old&seated
atop bald wheels
soggy under the weight
of rain&faded
parking lot
lights:

I think more
& more
she’s the one
thing my father left me
I’ve ever really used.
It’s a hell:

Of a time
they’re having.
Attempt after:

Attempt
to pry the ornament
from hood, paint-peeled
& chipped enough
to reveal the gray
of stone beneath:

Five minutes
of sneakers mounted
on her grill&a flurry
of whimpering tugs
it’s a real sword in the stone
scenario:

I lay back down
in bed with hope
in an anvil of heart
that one boy will
free the silver:

And to him
it will be
Excalibur:

And he will
brandish the star
the ornament the sword
long as a boy can:

Understand
there is no
outstretched arm. No
Lady hidden in crystal-misted Lake.
Every old white wizard
would see you burned
alive. Here no Merlin
will shoulder the spell
of all your weight:

With your own arm
you cut.
With your own arm
you take:

Here
we get after
our own.
From the gray
of stones we pry
we pull each jewel
of light. Here
we forge
our own:

Bodies laid
long
upon the anvil
of this street.


Between a Somerset Kitchen and Conodoguinet Creek
for Matsume Hasebe

In spring wind / peach blossoms begin / to come apart. /
Doubts do not / grow branches and / leaves.
-Dōgen Zenji, Sōtō school of Zen founder

Our fishing trip begins with a death
poem written on a napkin, however
not hastily but urgent blue fountain
pen left on the kitchen table for all
her daughters, but I’m the one
who pocketed it.

In spring wind
peach blossoms
begin to come apart.

How was I to know she could quote
Dōgen? I was seven and still sleepy
but the fish don’t sleep long, says obaasan
my little grandmother, Matsume
making me repeat it over and over
until I am bleating: o – baa – san —
o – baa – san — o – baa – san
like a sheep. She strokes the black wool
of my head and says, when I jab
at her with the end of an oar, not
to upset our boat, he who has been so kind.
She routs a sixth Marlboro Red, her fifth
still blossoming peach from compressed lips.

Doubts do not grow

Trout flash white over shards of broken
basalt. The creek rolls its shoulders across
the smooth bottom of our kindhearted boat. Rays
are corked yellow behind an Appalachian
foothill. The glossy fractals of our fishhooks
an excuse to tangle lines of communication
what shocks of light reach low for river face
between

branches and leaves.

“Do you know about death?” she says
and with time I nod, thumbing slow over the finale,
the last blue line of her poem in my pocket:

But there will be no spring for me.

Table of Contents

Contents

American Multitude
—
Nantucket Sleighride
American Our Punnet; Square Now? Square It.
—
An Old Song, a Frog’s Song
American Rust
In the Coffin Meant for Chief Little Horse, Archeologists Instead Find Two Others
Sons of Cain: Hunting a Ridge between Lockwood and Sizerville State Park
How to Clean a Boy
Below Our Tree, Stands
In One Small Bedroom: My Mother’s Antlers
“Get Out of the Goddamn Car”
Out My Apartment Window, West Baltimore: August, 2 A.M.
A Punnett Square Long Since Made and Frequently Renewed
Run Home, Boy: 2nd Street Harrisburg PA Summertime ’17
Home/boy
“Write about Being Tri-racial,” Says That Guy from Workshop
From Our Childhood Home / Now Deserted / My Brother Takes Nothing
What You Left Behind in Wheeling, WV
A. Real. Uncle. Tomtom.
Fall.
Our American Punnett ; Square Now? Square it.
—
As Dew, Born / As Dew
Born Year of the Uma
Between a Somerset Kitchen and Conodoguinet Creek
In the Garden, Winter’s Cherry
Hunting WASPs: Camp Rodney, 2001
On the Occasion I Participated in Two Very Different Flag Burnings
When your father is barely literate enough to read from the Bible aloud, but
on first memories two
teaching my daughter Japanese: 軍 in a single syllable, America
America Our Punnet ; SCALP of a Male Penobscot Indian Brought In as Evidence
just another flying river haiku
Son of a Klansmen’s Daughter
Quiescence Amongst Chaos
Punnett ; America n
just another love bird poem
just another friday night drug poem
small talk or in my hand galaxies
The Face of a Man
just another window poem
For my daughter who loves spiders&beetles&black nail polish
Final Paean of the Dowser
n

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Dēmos

“In a superbly inventive collection, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s work explores living under the dominance of whiteness in America and the history of violence, particularly against Native communities. These poems ask: is racial violence in this country’s DNA? How far will it go, how long will this go on? It is a bold inquisition into the damage that has been done, accomplished with creative risk-taking.” —Electric Literature, “Most Anticipated Poetry of 2021”

 “Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley brings together Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures to investigate multiracial dislocation, American intolerance, and the question we all ask—who am I?—in the teeming Dēmos: An American Multitude.”—Library Journal

 "Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's book Dēmos is a powerhouse collection of poems by a powerhouse poet. Dēmos showcases the range of the poet—one who can write lullaby lyrics and in the very next poem mold words out of fire. The energy in these poems is electric as Naka-Hasebe Kingsley explores and condemns the many injustices towards Native Americans and other marginalized communities throughout our short history. Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's poems are unflinching, unrelenting, disarming, and brilliant in their range, form, and language. This is a necessary book of ferocity and strength during a challenging time. "—Victoria Chang

 “With this latest collection, Kingsley writes an encompassing work that’s thematically wide-reaching and formally and linguistically playful, boasting poems that change in style, perspective, and temperament from one to the next. Kingsley proves an engaging, cerebral guide through it all.”—Library Journal

 “How do you secure a sense of self and home when those things are bloodied? In poems of visionary protest and tender restoration, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s Dēmos proposes answers to that distinctly American question. In Dēmos, place and body are like palimpsests inscribed over and over again by the violence of history and the violence of contemporary racial brutality. As one poem laments, ‘I was born what I am in ash.’ And yet, out of a scorched and brindled self, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley presents a lyric voice that is as powerful as any we now have in our poetry.”—Rick Barot  

 “These poems are like found object sculptures—but the rivets are words, wordplay, and the invention. From Punnett squares as form to leftovers as metaphor for tri-racial identity, Benjamín Naka-Hasbey Kingsley presents a sensibility born out of multiple histories of oppression that asserts survival and demands understanding.”—Heid E. Erdrich

 “With language as his pigment, with poetic form as his palette knives, Kingsley creates layer upon intimate layer as he uncovers multitudinous selves, simultaneously exploring just who is this WE in this ‘We the People.’”—River Heron Review

 “Recommended for readers eager for nonquaint novels about seniors.”—Library Journal

From the Publisher

07/01/2021

With this latest collection, Kingsley writes an encompassing work that's thematically wide-reaching and formally and linguistically playful, boasting poems that change in style, perspective, and temperament from one to the next. Kingsley proves an engaging, cerebral guide through it all, directing his attention down myriad paths and even questioning his own function and ethical responsibility: "i wonder / how often i have mistaken myself / for the seer for the see-er and others simply as the seen." But for all its bold probing, the collection is ultimately too haphazard to entirely work. Its overall structure can be jarring: heady disquisitions bleed into minimalist interludes before jumping into formal experiments, like a poem lifted from a news article's racist comment section, or a series of Punnett square poems that work better in theory than in formal execution. Kingsley's diction is equally brazen, with similarly mixed results: his comparison of a lit cigarette's embered end and a "blossoming peach" is considerably more successful than a line like "Here no Merlin / will shoulder the spell / of all your weight." VERDICT There are impressive moments liberally littered throughout this work, which brims with important rhetoric, but finally it feels a bit too scattered.—Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL

Library Journal