Don't Let Them See Me Like This

by Jasmine Gibson

Overview

In Don’t Let Them See Me Like This, Jasmine Gibson explores myriad intersectional identities in relation to The State, disease, love, sex, failure, and triumph. Speaking to those who feel disillusioned by both radical and banal spaces and inspired/informed by moments of political crisis: Hurricane Katrina, The Jena Six, the extrajudicial executions of Black people, and the periods of insurgency that erupted in response, this book acts as a synthesis of political life and poetic form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643620640
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	870 KB

About the Author

JASMINE GIBSON is a Philly jawn based in Brooklyn. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire, and freedom. She is the author of the chapbook Drapetomania.

What People are Saying About This

Chris Nealon

“The poem’s present broaches terms with a painful, deep past; to take the measure of political and bodily suffering without collapsing under its weight; to find a path for the experience of sexuality and desire that doesn’t lead right to pain.”

Editorial Reviews

06/18/2018
The personal is unavoidably political in Gibson’s debut, a confrontation with the multitudinous layers of her identity and a dissection of how identity is impacted by systemic oppression and anti-blackness. Throughout, she dances between metaphor and casual conversation, revealing slippages that can occur amid a person’s attempts to claim a sense of autonomy. In the opening poem, “Bender,” Gibson gets at the often illusory nature of freedom and the ways a person’s conception of self is at the mercy of larger forces: “we know the state is collecting our image/ for a time when we’ll remember, maybe incorrectly.” In “Heavy Metal,” thoughts of Hurricane Katrina, the Flint water crisis, and the Syrian civil war churn amid descriptions of desirous bodies, “your body on mine and how I want you to melt on my tongue.” A sense of impending doom pervades the work in such lines as “We only mourn blacks who die/ for peace treaties and reasons/ that ultimately don’t lead us to liberation.” If black people are routinely sacrificed for a freedom that never fully arrives, Gibson wonders, then how do the people get free? For Gibson, the collected evidence points in one direction: “If Black Lives Matter, then that means the destruction of America.” (July)

Publishers Weekly

"[I]ntense poems that feel exactly like love in a dying world."

From the Publisher