Concealed Nations

by Joël Félix

Poetry. In an agitated, elegiac, and personalized series of poetic propositions, Joel Felix in CONCEALED NATIONS, his follow up to LIMBS OF THE APPLE TREE NEVER DIE, engages questions of justice both racial and social, white survivalism and gun-rights communities, family life and loss, drone strikes and the Islamic State, lab testing, and lyric lineage and transcendence. Tyrone Williams, writing in Jacket2, called LIMBS "a moving meditation on the impossibility and necessity of poetry, on history as 'enslavement without end,' and the possibility, however unlikely, that there remains, its brutalities notwithstanding, a truth-telling residue in language." CONCEALED NATIONS presses that truth-telling towards oracle and curse, finding a voice of clarity and frustration to reflect the times. "The page," writes Felix, "is the glass I am trying to break."

89 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

A historian of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, Joel Felix is Professor of History at the University of Reading.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, take my word, was the 16 year-old American of Yemeni descent killed in a drone strike in Yemen on October 14, 2011, on an order from Barack Obama. Two weeks earlier, the U.S.'s principal target, the boy's father, Anwar Al-Awlaki, had been similarly assassinated in a drone strike. Five and a half years later, in January 2017, Abdulrahman's 8 year-old half-sister, Nawar, was killed on Trump's order. While the Obama administration endeavored to shift the target in the strike that killed the 16 year-old to another terrorist, claiming the boy just happened to be there, the subsequent death in a commando raid of the half-sister suggests strongly that what we have here is a mob hit -- a "kill chain," to adopt the colloquialism Joel Felix uses as title in probably the most vigilant and insomniac of the poems in his second full-length volume, Concealed Nations.

Upon the death of the sister, Felix found (on-line) papers that document two words that might have captured, however briefly, the consciousness of the victim, Abdulrahman's, final thoughts. That's a fine subject for a poem of witness in which poetry's orders are implicated in the orders of communication and data. The poem imagines the co-emergent forms of the data identifying the boy's logistical-demographic presence in the American State's surveillance of him, seeing in it "a mirror's steam || and where there's smoke there's volume || for objects in derivative places, | sounds, holes, shadows, || the mere siren | a signal." How do we justify imaginatively that terror that permits our quiet soothing of a domesticated animal? "We are born without the right to be forgotten," Felix reminds us, "the data are an entity | primed for terror in a thousand scenarios || in the drag this morning of the rain band's long tail || over the propensity field." We should take some note of when Abdulrahman's half-sister was murdered. Less than two weeks after Inauguration. When a new administration turns up, the State's lethality carries less consequence, underscoring our captivity to this very entity. "What is the person the prison system wants you to be?" Felix asks. He follows this dark meditation with a dramatic monologue, found, from an co-worker/election worker in Broward County, Florida, where the stakes in the State have been politicized to a "tribal" degree.

In these "concealed nations" I find greater conviction than in the civil rights tourism of the previous Felix volume, Leaves of the Apple Tree Never Die.

[Anne Baldwin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have a similar issue with this collection as I had with his "Limbs of the Apple Tree May Never Die." This white poet has a tendency toward tourism of the pain of people of color, which he writes about in such a way that always ends up somehow centering the white poet's own reveries. Like Dana Shutz's Emmet Till Casket painting, he inserts himself from a position of white safety into the story of opressed others to speak from a vantage point that he has done nothing to earn, besides in his case stumbling upon some letters to which he has no right or connection, or take a shambling walk around the Birmingham Civil Rights museum like a freshman on a field trip. That he manages to make this all somehow still grandiose is appalling but not surprising.