a more perfect Union
by Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Mad Creek Books
Review by Esteban Rodríguez
On a more perfect Union by Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Sometimes being in a different environment can help us understand something we never knew before, or it can reinforce ideas and concepts we had always understood. Sometimes it allows for both. In Teri Ellen Cross Davis’s newest collection a more perfect Union (Mad Creek Books, 2021), a trip abroad coupled with reflections of life at home provide an opportunity to learn from the daily journeys of motherhood, womanhood, love, loss, and the complexity of being Black in America.
While Cross Davis’s title might suggest a collection that is exclusively grounded in the United States, Ireland figures prominently in the book, not necessarily in terms of pages dedicated to the country, but in the impact and contrast it illuminates. We see this in “A Black Woman Gets a Window Seat on Aer Lingus” (Aer Lingus being the Irish airline). Although Ireland, from what we can read in between the lines, is a pleasant trip, the speaker longs to return to what she knows best:
Enough Ireland.
For all your lush
effusion of color—
inside me blooms
a masochistic loneliness.
Give me the screws
I know best,
the policeman
quick to test
my Yes, Sir
as acidless.
Upon first read, one might be inclined to chalk up the longing for an encounter with a police officer as merely sarcasm, but there is a tragedy that is present here, specifically in terms of the relationship the speaker has with the police, and by extension authority figures. The speaker knows that such encounters are anything but ideal, and they become much more dire given prejudices and lethal force. What awaits when the speaker gets off the plane and arrives back in the U.S. could as well be such an occurrence, but home is home, and as the plane descends, the speaker confesses that she “breathes easier,” but “breathes less.” Even though we can assume that the speaker wants to stay in Ireland, they must return to and endure the place that has a proclivity to suffocate her.
Cross Davis illuminates this more clearly in “A Black Woman Learns Ireland’s History by Bus,” where the speaker recounts her journey through different Irish cities—especially Dublin—and how they reveal a connection to her:
Dublin—
how I got sweet on you,
I do not know. Blame that
ancestor long ago—let’s hope
it was consensual. But the
words that crawl your streets
align with my fault lines, neither
of us accustomed to joy.
Ireland’s history with England is a complicated and bloody one, and because the speaker recognizes that, she also acknowledges that experiencing joy that you’ve never experienced is not always easy. There is a challenge to feeling good and proud of oneself, but, despite the difficulty, it is worth the time and effort to do so.
Back home in the U.S., Cross Davis confronts the realities of a Black mother raising children. “Partus sequitur ventrem” details a mother’s attention to her son at an age (six) where his body is transforming and become beautiful. But with that beauty comes the recognition of how quickly loss can arrive:
—let my love
be a note safety-pinned to his chest
—send him back alive, unharmed.
As a Black mother in America,
I know my wails are birthright,
pinned with iron,
penned in ink.
There is a fatalistic quality to the last three lines of the poem, since the speaker realizes the ways in which the past and its injustices still influence how the Black community interacts with everyone in the present. The speaker’s son, therefore, is no longer a six-year-old boy, but rather he is someone who is at the mercy of “someone / following him in the store,” or “someone holding [his] life / in trembling fingers poised above / a phone’s keypads.” His body and selfhood are at times dependent on someone else’s sentiments and actions, which always puts him at risk. What Cross Davis understands, however, is that poetry, as well as literature, can provide a call to action to change the way society views certain groups of people.
In “This Poem Suggests Revolution,” the speaker elaborates on this potential:
This poem will not be your bottom bitch,
America. This poem does not consent to
Blackness being window-dressing for the
diversity brochure of a country where
the board of directors never changed.
This poem reads the fine print in you,
America.
No longer will the speaker, the poem, or the poet adhere to standards that have never changed, and instead, the poem will seek to “pen a new document,” one that is no longer tied to old prejudices and the status quo.
While the speaker in Cross Davis’s poems are concerned with the present and what the future has to offer, there is a certain nostalgia for the past, not necessarily because it was a simpler time, but because it’s a chance to remember and reinforce the small moments that shape who she was as a woman. At times it’s in love letters, or in Prince and his status as a sex symbol. And in “Bad Girls Album Cover,” it’s finding inspiration in Donna Summers and her confidence. As she says at the end, “Why wouldn’t I / want to be like her—up front about being wanted?” Cross Davis teaches us that we should never not be true to ourselves and our surroundings. a more perfect Union is nothing short of a collection that will move us as much as it will make us laugh, cry, and rethink how we interact with the world. Hold onto this book. It will no doubt teach us how to live better than we did before.