by JULIA MALLORY
The day before I bought my copy of essayist and poet Kendra Allen’s The Collection Plate (Ecco, 2021), I fell off a jet ski in the middle of a man-made lake in Georgia. In an instant, I told myself not to panic. Yet, when I slipped under the vast body of water, my reason turned to dread even though I was wearing a life vest and not alone. I, like Allen, who in an interview with writer Kiese Laymon about the collection, stated “if I can’t feel my feet under me…large bodies of water, I’ll go in but Imma see the shore.” Water—wetness, being soaked or submerged—is central to the collection, and serves as a repeated theme throughout. Allen said “the way I can get to that vulnerable voice is by repeating myself” and by the end of the book, her words leave her see-through. The writing is bold and clear, even if they emerge from the murky conditions that make us human.
The first thing I notice about Kendra Allen’s full-length debut collection of poems, The Collection Plate, is the way its cardinal red hardcover hints at a church hymnal as it peeks beneath its dust jacket. It too, may be a religious text, documenting the survival and salvation of its subjects. Each poem, a tributary that flows across the page in form or a tribute to those that did not survive. A reminder that while water can be a purifying medium, it can also be dangerous—both a site of healing and harm.
One of the last times I was in church on purpose, a spectacle was made of the gift of prophecy and one-by-one, parishioners were taken down to the ground. They tried to convey their submission to The Word and the so-called prophetic word they had received only to end up under the ego of a rogue missionary. The narrator in the opening poem, “Evening Service,” also knows something about a sanctified spectacle by way of baptism:
at set time I walk out from behind
the choir stands the curtains open the people scream
[…]for the good show (1)
And they feel the pressure for “an encore,” after they survive their baptism:
if I could swim I wouldn’t die
[…]say sorry for wasting the first eight years of my life (2)
It’s as if they know that you can’t be born again if you don’t die first. If you don’t drain your desire to sin with a near drowning.
There is a degree of tension about the role of the F/father throughout the poems and who the speaker actually reveres. Throughout the text, the capitalized “Father” seems to both signal the Christian deity and an earthly parent. One could imagine that the speaker was raised to call on the F/father when in need. Yet, they seem to have moments where they felt unseen and uncared for. In “Our Father’s house (ii),” one of five in a numbered series throughout the collection, they ask, “Father, are you feeding me?” (32) This uncertainty is a stark contrast to the reverence they reserve for the women figures in their life in “I come to you as humbly as I know how:”
all this bending this waking blasphemous
not to god
but to most mothers
who are
my god (22)
even if they do not agree with their choices, specifically their worship of the Father:
I think
that’s how she phrases it every time she auditions for your love (22)
Perhaps this reverence is an acknowledgement of what they have endured. Women that have been put through the wringer. Flattened and drained. Drowned and undrowned. From the contrapuntal poem, “We had died real quick:”
routine into repentance
wring a woman out (26)
Or another example from “Let’s leave:”
my body
Moisture
is wrung out (47)
And sometimes before they are yet, women:
I was never a child
“Look at the material” (3)
Water remains a constant throughout the collection—a register of near death and death—specifically drownings. In “Learning to tread water,” a perspective is offered on the “Black folks don’t swim” discussion:
say hood kids can’t swim
and it’s a shame but thank you
for allowing us to teach them
they don’t say there ain’t enough
pools to be found in Galilee anyway
or that these kids can be found
dead at the bottom of any body
of water whether they can swim or not (28)
The summer my son was killed, two boys, both eight, drowned in separate incidents in the ancient river near us. One down river, one up river. And I can’t help think about the June 19, 1981 drowning deaths of three Black teenagers, Carl Baker, Steven Booker, and Anthony Freeman that were arrested during a Juneteenth celebration at Lake Mexia in Mexia, Texas. All three drowned when the boat they were being transported on, capsized. All three law enforcement officers survived. Yet, Baker and Booker were described as exceptional swimmers.
However, there is a different type of water in “I’m tired of yo ass always crying” which reads like an obituary to white tears, or an experience of weaponized, emotional simulation. In “Naked & Afraid”, rooted in whiteness, the spectacle and sport of the survival simulation industrial complex, is also called out:
One of the biggest challenges contestants face
on the show is finding drinkable water. (36)
and in conversation with its companion poem, “Afraid & Naked”, which highlights how some communities don’t even have safe drinking water (e.g., Flint, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi):
One of the biggest challenges citizens face
is finding drinkable water. (38)
Last year, a neighboring town with a history of water woes, hired a public works director who plead no contest to dumping millions of untreated raw sewage into nearby creeks. In their defense, they said they were not aware of his background at the time of hiring. And yes, yes he was.
There is a closeup scene in Julie Dash’s 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust with a short stem of baby’s breath in water in a short crystal glass nearly underneath the bed. This moving image puts me in the mind of the images represented by alliteration and broken up across lines in “A trilogy everyone watches:”
…baby breaths
[…]liquid living…
[…]…dinner for a denomination (19)
[…]shrink back into summers
…sorrow the sticky
stuff (20)
“Alliteration as imagination” as Allen believes.4 Alliteration to hit every angle of hurt, before a devastating, final line:
when kids gotta learn to grieve too (20)
And how shall we grieve, premature Black death across the span of generations? In “All the things that stretch out my lower back”, I am remembering the 1918 extrajudicial murder (lynching) of a pregnant Mary Turner, her baby ripped from her body:
When my sky fell all I asked for was gold teeth
I swear I saw mouths strained singing choruses
after the front yard’s organs cut out its center (33)
[…]my happy baby full and proud
my rope chewed out (34)
Two babies at home. And in the now-era of #SayHerName, Allen asks us to reckon with the reality that:
Ain’t no rallies—ain’t no protests—ain’t no local night news bout a ghetto girl head/
wound with three babies at home…(18)
My close, childhood friend didn’t survive our first year of adulthood. A head wound. One baby at home.
It was June Jordan who asked “and what shall we do, we who did not die?” Allen shows us that remembrance is a start in “I ain’t never baked a thing from scratch a day in my life:”
archive all my niggas
their names & numerals (48)
Ultimately, with The Collection Plate, we are called to the altar so that we may collect our breath, testify how we endured our near drowning(s), and yet, managed to LIVE.