A Beauty Has Come

Jasmine Gibson is a proud “Philly jawn,” a social worker, and a poet fluent in an amalgamation of discourses: psychoanalysis, astrology, pop and jazz’s further reaches, the street-meets-book smarts of those who “rock Clark’s / Read Marx.” The poems of her second collection might open with eloquent shade—“I forget even the meekest of bitches can act / brand new”—only to meditate on “winnicottian intersubjectivity of the / hallucinatory fantasies of the womb and child” before landing on firm, aphoristic ground: “no one consents to being born.”

Cutting through the crosstalk are two clarion refrains: “A beauty has come” and “The beautiful one has come.” Gibson, an “upsetter / Holding critical hope to my chest,” counterbalances clear-eyed dissent with the highest aspirations for aesthetic and political liberation: “Bitches just want it all / At least this one does.” Gibson’s sharpest encapsulations of upsetting and hope alike are her rhetorical questions. Sometimes they’re short, serial, rapid-fire, modulating mid-line from faux-naïveté to indignant sarcasm: “what the fuck is a flash mob? / can I join? does it block the ports?” Sometimes, spanning pages, they breathlessly cross-examine pat institutional logics, jumping straightaway to their disastrous conclusions:

we are all good enough mothers responding to the cry of climate crisis
will it take 5 or 10 years to find an appropriate price for clean air and sunshine rights?
will everyone receive a free all-inclusive package to a former commons?

Gibson could fill collections with weapons-grade contempt, but she dares to hope for connection, collectivity, and “A Call And Response” of “(Black Sound)”: “I am what I am when I am / With you,” she swears. A Beauty Has Come ends by imagining “a plantation on fire / and every financial system / choking on the gravity of reparations”—in the unlikely context of a hummable love song: “The weight of my love for you is / the failure of the global economy.” To hope to sing “I have everything I want / I am what I want,” and mean it: that, Gibson avows, “is our love song, our disco, our sonámbula.”