The exploits you find in my comics are no more probable than snow in Sunnyvale. I’m not as black as you dream. —from “Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is With humor and the serious collector’s delight, Gary Jackson imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend.
I hope that if Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson's character from Unbreakable) had grown up to be a poet instead of a mass-murdering comic art dealer, he'd have produced a book as good as this.
--If the title and cover art don't bring it home for you, you'll quickly realize that this collection is built around a deep and lifelong passion for comic books. Spiderman, Ironman, The Watchmen, Professor X, and of course Supes & the Caped crusader are all either referenced or utilized as astonishingly effective narrators for poems throughout the book. Whether it's Lois Lane reflecting on her love for a near-immortal alien, Tony Stark radically redefining his alcoholism, or a racial deconstruction of the X-Men's Storm, Jackson's debut volume is steeped in the mythology, grandiosity, and essential humanness of superheroes and their stories. And you know what? It works. It works more than you could possibly imagine because these comics, these heroes, they BELONG here. Never once does it seem as if Jackson is forcing these masked and fantastic characters to have some artistic/real-world weight that they don't possess. In his hands they truly have that weight. You will read a witness' account of Superman's funeral and think "Damn…", you'll see Nightcrawler's attempt to pick up a woman in a bar and say "That dude is slick…and he definitely has a point." Seamless & authentic integration of comic lore into these poems would ultimately be rather meaningless if it was done in a way that shut out readers who weren't comic fans or who didn't grow up on the genre. You don't need to worry about that here. It doesn't matter if can tell Namor from Aquaman…or if you just don't care, as long as your willing to follow Jackson's lead you'll be rewarded by this book.
--It'd be a pretty unfair reduction to say that this volume is ALL about comics. Not so. While Jackson mastefully puts their influence to use throughout the book. There are plenty of less pop-culturally infused moments where he reflects on race, his Topeka past, long-gone love, and his powerfully remembered suicidal friend…among many other things. This is a truly complete work and stunning debut.
This book makes for great discussion whether one likes it (as in has an affinity for comic books, etc) or does not. It's an interesting concept and I'm glad to see Jackson's effort realized in a complete book.
It is not necessarily the language and the weaving of comic book characters that prompted me to give Missing You, Metropolis 4 stars; it's the lines that stick with me the day after I'd read them. I'm left thinking about the nature of the lines whether my reaction is negative, positive, visceral or analytical...lines that make me think about poetry and blood and race and life:
"Blacks were still rare/ on our street, while whites/ filled the neighborhood like dead/ leaves in pool water." (from Stuart)
"He wanted to see how the veins/ pulled it all together, hoping to make sense/ of god's machine" (from Machine)
"I drudge down familiar streets, careful/ to avoid high school crushes,/ teachers, bullies, cousins who never made it out/ of the state they were born in." (from Gap)
"why Mikey/ once wore a wedding dress to work;" (from Bleed)
"And I would feed you a lie,/ one of the little ones - the kind that turns/ strangers to lovers, that runs words to poems." (from Listening to Plath in Poetics)
my dear friend mr. gary mf-ing jackson wrote this book. everyone should read it, ever. even if you don't like poems, you know you like super heroes. come on, you do.
For many boys, superhero comic books offer a temporary refuge, a parallel world in which to entertain fantasies of power and take solace in moral simplicities. As Gary Jackson puts it in "The Secret Art of Reading a Comic," echoing Auden: "The old comics were never wrong." It's a Platonic world where the tragic is effaced and elided: Captain America "falling and helpless / to watch Bucky / fragment into pieces" is an image you won't find illustrated in the early comics about the hero and his sidekick, though it's suggested all the same.
Jackson knows all this and more, but his debut volume Missing You, Metropolis, selected as winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Yusef Komunyakaa, also recognizes the fundamental aloneness of superheroes, and how their dual selves can function as a potent metaphor for what W. E. B. DuBois called "the double consciousness" of African Americans. Like mutants, black people in America are alien too. This theme is made explicit in a furious poem, "Magneto Eyes Strange Fruit":
Out for a midnight flight, I see two children on the playground --
the rust of blood crusting over holes in their heads.
In contrast, the more elegiac "Xorn" (another character, like the aforementioned Magneto, derived from X-Men comics) envisions the Other as both healing angel and monster.
Throughout the book, the author employs persona and narrative poems to explore friendship, violence, the grief of a sister's early death, the racial isolation of a Kansan childhood, adolescent seduction, and the forlorn waste of pornography. In both "Emergency" and "Fade," Jackson bravely confronts the emotional costs of suicide.
For all its disarming charm and surface breeziness, as well as the deliberate use of couplets and quatrains to mimic the formal borders that contain a comic's narrative, this book sounds profound depths of rage, lust, sorrow, and estrangement. In "How to Get Lynched on the Job," the poet acknowledges an ever-present racial fear, evoking the memory of Emmett Till, who was beaten to death in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Simultaneously, in "The Family Solid," the speaker acknowledges a hardy resilience:
Surprising, I know, but black kids find a way out without getting locked up or put down.
And poems like "Nightcrawler Buys a Woman a Drink" and "Home from Work, I Face My Newborn Mutant Son" -- the former an outright seduction, the latter a meditation on strangeness -- show how much range the author can get out of his comic book tropes.
But if comic books function as virtual or alternative worlds, Jackson doesn't surrender uncritically to the fantasy. "Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is" exposes the racial fiction often present in this pulp literature:
No matter how three-dimensional he seems, know that behind every jive turkey uttered there is not a black mouth, but a white one, one that dictates who he calls Nigger, to temper the perfect tone of black.
Early on, Leslie Fiedler noted a similar paradox when he observed that two Jewish youth from Cleveland invented Superman, a super-goyische hero, in response to beatings they received during the 1930s. But there's more than mere deconstruction going on here. The poet also addresses male silence: "We don't / talk about ourselves" ("Emergency"). In "The Silver Age," he points to the homoerotic relationship between male adolescent readers and their beloved superheroes:
There is always a time, dear reader, when you're the other lover -- the new partner with young skin and an impressionable mind.
In the end, comic books represent an escape, a remove, a deferral from "Topeka, Kansas, / the whole goddamn world" that "bears down / like a freight train" ("Reading Comic Books in the Rain"). Missing You, Metropolis heralds a new voice unafraid to embrace pop culture, and to discover in it a world at once paradoxical, desired, and cruel.
As much as I love poetry and love to pore over it, I think sometimes that contemporary poetry doesn't do a great job of being accessible. One thing I'm loving about Gary Jackson's "Missing You, Metropolis" is that I'm already thinking of all the people who I'm going to send a copy of this book to - some of the recipients will be poets, but some won't be. And I do think we need more collections that are accessible in that way.
These poems are definitely narrative in nature, often telling a story, and delighting in intelligent turns at the poems' ends. Gary Jackson's got a somewhat conversational style, without sacrificing an attention to language and syntax. I found his line breaks more relaxed than other poets, which was refreshing. His work does not dwell so deeply in image that there's no sense of plot or character - so that when an image does occur, I'm ready for it. I'm not smothered by it, as can sometimes happen.
Of course, there's the subject matter. Others have written about it, so I won't go on too long, but the blend of superheroes and comics with the notions of race in America, friendship, sexuality, grief - all of it comes together to add to the collection's attractiveness and intrigue. I felt "let in" by poems of characters I've known almost my entire life, and then asked to empathize and think about them - and real people, around me - in different ways than I am perhaps used to.
I'd pick a favorite from the collection, but there's so many good ones: "The Dilemma of Lois Lane," "Iron Man's Intervention, Starring the Avengers," and "Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is" all stick with me, just off the top of my head.
In short - excellent collection. I'll be reading it again and passing it to friends. There's a reason Komunyakaa chose "Missing You, Metropolis" for the Cave Canem poetry prize.
A collection of poems that reimagines super heroes lives, along themes of race, identity, survival, and hope.
from Stuart: "Blacks were still rare / on our street, while whites / filled the neighborhood like dead / leaves in pool water. // We emerged into the world / in the same room: / our mothers' friendship triggered / by our simultaneous birth."
from Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is: "Don't believe everything you read. / The exploits you find in my comic / are no more probable / than snow in Sunnyvale. / I'm not as black as you dream. // But a body has to make a living. / And I play the part / better than any. I know / the dangers of believing / every shade of black you see."
from Gap: "I do this / for all of us. My sister buried in Topeka. / My mother who left for Dallas. The boy / I used to be who still clings to the years between. // I swore I would never come back. / My mother does not swear, / but bears the same memories that lie beneath // Kansas green, waiting to break open / like rain on concrete."
I have some issues with this one. The poems were well-written, but almost all of the female characters in his poems only exist in relation to a man. At this point, I'd frankly rather an author not include women at all rather than write them so poorly, especially when a few of the poems here are written from a woman's POV. There was also one poem that struck me as actually rather problematic, implying that a man who sexually harassed a woman at work is the real victim, because he's black and she's white. I don't dispute that race is still a contentious issue in America, and that black men especially are punished far worse than their white counterparts, but a man who harasses a woman is always the one at fault. Period. He is not Emmett Till, and I found it incredibly distasteful that Jackson made that comparison.
I read this for one of my poetry classes in school. While I do think there are several great poems, I really struggled to enjoy (meaning, I didn't really) reading this collection. Right from the beginning all the way through the collection, women were always incredibly sexualized to the point where I was physically uncomfortable. I thought in the beginning it might have just been reflecting a teenage boy's perspective on the world and we might see him transform through the collection, but it never happened. There was no development or redemption in regards to this. I do think that there are great instances of writing, storytelling and foreshadowing, as well as references to comic books that I enjoyed. But I'm sad to say that the oversexualization of women overwhelmed the experience.
There were some pretty good poems toward the end — mostly X-Men inspired. Most of the rest felt tired or as if they didn’t benefit from the form.
The reason I gave 2 stars instead of three was that nearly every poem about women (and many were told from the POV of comic book women) made me feel icky. Really icky. Like physical cringing icky. Like old fashioned (and I guess modern) look how women are treated/portrayed in this comic book icky. Which is a disappointing shame.
Had to read this book for a class, I was a little wary when I started to read it because I am not much of a poetry person anymore. But Jackson did a great job at using superheroes and real world events to make the poetry seem real and not boring. There were even a few poems that really made me cry because of how much I could relate to them. Defiantly a great read for teens!
Whether you’re a poet or a comics fan, you’ll likely get a whole lot out of Missing You, Metropolis, but I’d recommend dog-earing the pages of the poems you dig so that you can easily go back to them and avoid the ones that feel like filler. Particular favorites include “Iron Man’s Intervention, Starring the Avengers” as well as two poems about prominent black superheroes, “Storm on Display” and “Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is,” both of which tackle the ideas of blackness in comics and the problems that come with the titular characters despite the positive things they bring to the superhero genre.
I picked up this book expecting something cheesy and juvenile, though probably funny whether intentional or not, being that so much of it was based around comics with which I was familiar, but I was pleasantly surprised at the depth and emotion Jackson reached with works both inspired by comics and not. He transitions well between tales of race relations, old age, and romance, and while I'm not usually sold on poetic styles similar to what Jackson consistently uses here, he often builds a definite rhythm and sucks the reader into his verse with quality enjambment that few writers seem to be able to utilize without losing the reader's attention. I didn't love every poem, but I certainly liked the majority of them. Good stuff.
I love this one. How could I not, though, as it combines my life-long loves of comics and poetry into a fantastic volume.
It would have been so easy for Jackson to make these poems gimmicky but every analysis of every superhero just works on a level that is pure poetry - no gimmicks at all.
For me, the X-men poems (and the poems that don't directly deal with comics at all) work the best as I was a huge x-men fan back in the day. Even if you weren't a comics reader, however, I think you would still find plenty to love. This is a talented poet and I can't wait to read more of his work.
Jackson is certainly inspired, that much is plain, but his execution is poor at times. A few of the poems, like "Magneto Eyes Strange Fruit" and "After the Green" are brilliant. Unfortunately, most of the others did not resonate with me. I felt his language could have striven further, or been more earnest. I'm curious to read more of his work.
Simple and refreshing. I took my time reading to savor this collection.
You don't have to read the comic books that are mentioned in Jackson's collection (but it would be more pleasurable if you did). I still enjoyed the poems. They're insightful and have multiple meanings outside of the comic book world. This is a great collection for a time when comic books are booming in interest again.
(this old review has been removed by its author after reflection -- i still didn't care much for this collection, but i was a total ass in how i articulated it. obviously many people enjoyed these poems very much, so please read and judge for yourself)
I really loved this collection of poetry, the book was impossible to put down and I finished it in one sitting. I'm just getting over a lifelong aversion to poetry and I'm glad I picked this book up, I recommend it to anyone who is new to poetry or is a bit of a comic book geek!
Great book of poetry. Because of my lack of experience with comics and graphic novels I was lost numerous times to specific poem references. Definitely had to google many people of the comic book world. Great poems though, raw and real.