PROTEST AND PRAYER: A REVIEW OF MICHAEL KLEBER-DIGGS’S WORLDLY THINGS
Milkweed Editions, 2021. 88 pages. $22.00.
The title Worldly Things might suggest fleeting pleasures or petty indulgences, items meant to decay. Farmed catfish and aging bananas, mist over the Minnesota River, a pebble in one’s shoe: these are tactile images both familiar and fathomable. But for debut poet Michael Kleber-Diggs, the phrase has a higher meaning. We, too, are worldly things—passing bodies in a particular moment, impermanent yet never disposable. “Our moment here is small,” writes Kleber-Diggs. “I am too.” And it’s the poet’s work to explore that smallness, to locate joy and inspire compassion, meanwhile critiquing the systems that seek to stamp out our potential.
Worldly Things, winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, is concerned with parenthood and personhood, injustice, grief, and hope. The speaker of these poems—presumably Kleber-Diggs himself—lost his father at age eight to gun violence. As such, the specter of loss hangs over the collection, though it mingles with the wonder of Kleber-Diggs becoming a father himself. Worldly Thingsis separated into three sections, each with thirteen or fourteen poems. The first section presents a portrait of the artist, his parents, and the repercussions of his father’s early death. The second addresses police brutality and American oppression. The third and final section is more diffuse, with poems about family, friendship, daily experience, and the craft of writing.
The inescapable theme in Worldly Things is racial injustice. The collection begins with a Black teenager in the backseat of a police car, and it ends with a woman crossing the street to avoid a Black man. Elsewhere, the poet calls attention to water pollution in Flint, Michigan; Native American protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline; and inhumane statements made about incarcerated peoples. (Kleber-Diggs teaches in the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.) Yet the most frequent subject is police violence against Black men. This violence is all too common, which urges Kleber-Diggs to interrogate its many forms and consequences. In the poem “Access,” he reflects on the grief that ripples outward from another needless death: “For every disruption, corresponding / devastations, every fallen figure topples / all the tiles around it.”
We witness those devastations in the poem “Back in Huntington,” which narrates the death of Joshua Dyer, who was shot during a police chase in Indianapolis in June 2015. The poem takes an omniscient approach, flitting from the scene of the shooting to the victim’s mother being notified, from the offending officer’s domestic life to an intern entering Dyer’s name in a database. The poem concludes years later with Dyer’s son questioning the loss—senseless and avoidable. By this approach, Kleber-Diggs demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of what might otherwise become yet another passing headline.
Other poems react to specific instances of systemic violence. “Man Dies After Coma” takes as its subject Freddie Gray, who died of injuries sustained while in police custody in Baltimore in April 2015. By using strikethrus and bold type, the poem condemns the media language employed to absolve police assailants while demonizing the victims. The poem “Grinding Down to Prayer” reflects on the agony of George Floyd’s death, after Floyd was forcefully restrained by a police officer in south Minneapolis in May 2020. And as stated at the back of the collection, five additional poems were inspired by a video of one mother’s reaction to learning her child had been killed by police.
These needless deaths produce both outrage and exhaustion. In “America Is Loving Me to Death,” Kleber-Diggs defies pledging allegiance to a nation that “won’t pledge / Even tolerance in return.” Perhaps the most powerful and ambitious poem in Worldly Things, “America Is Loving Me to Death” is structured as an acrostic golden shovel, the first letters of each line spelling out the poem’s title, while the end words reluctantly articulate the Pledge of Allegiance. As political critique, the poem adopts a righteous and well-earned sense of anger:
[. . . ]I hear the enduring republic,
Erect and proud, asking through ravenous teeth, Who do you riot for?
Tamir? Sandra? Medgar? George? Breonna? Elijah? Philando? Eric? Which
One? Like it can’t be all of them. Like it can’t be the entirety of it:
Destroyed brown bodies, dismantled homes
What good is poetry in the face of such injustice? Kleber-Diggs isn’t one for passivity, nor does he blindly accept the status quo. In the more personal poems of Worldly Things, he charts out an ethics of awareness. For example, “What Name for This?” ponders the varieties and possibilities of prayer, while “Coniferous Fathers” suggests a newer, more gentle mode of fatherhood. Through it all, Kleber-Diggs retains a sense of humility and humane generosity. When, in “Every Mourning,” the poet is viewed as a threat just by walking down the sidewalk in his own neighborhood, he exclaims, “Dear friends, I am the nicest man on earth.” And while it’s stated half-jokingly, it’s easy to believe.
Stylistically, the poems in Worldly Things are never too dense. They adhere to standard syntax, and the verbal technique—repetition, internal rhyme, assonance—is often subtle and never showy. Although a few poems dance across the page, using indentations and white space, most are structured in couplets, tercets, or single stanzas. On first reading, the poems might appear simple—that’s to say, accessible—but the clarity and precision show through upon closer study. One such poem is “Fixtures,” a rumination on commuting to work before sunrise that expands into a reflection on bodegas, mini-marts, and their clerks who are “brown / like me.” The poem concludes by lamenting our negligence for the people we see daily yet with whom we fail to engage: “People so invisible / we can’t see each other—hypervisible people.”
The poems of Worldly Things are of the moment—fraught and disillusioned, yet sincerely optimistic. In them, Kleber-Diggs establishes himself as a compassionate guide to modern America, documenting our worries and pleasures, our struggles and celebrations. In “What Name for This?” the poet finds himself “summoned // to spaces magnified in community.” He continues:
I walk forward to say this—this is what
I have to offer: one part of my small story.
Or, this is what I’ve witnessed;
I want you to notice it, too.
To follow Kleber-Diggs is to witness the modern condition—to notice it, interrogate it, appreciate it. His worldly things might be ephemeral, yet they’re anything but small. As these confident, unflinching poems accumulate, so too does a genuinely nuanced worldview: disappointed but never cynical, hurt yet forever hopeful.