Captivity

Captivity is a work of deep power and music. In the title poem, the speaker's uncle displays animal pelts, blowing on the fur to show us its 'shining underlife.' Toi Derricotte's poems show us our underlife, tender and dreadful. And they are vibrant poems, poems in the voice of the living creature, the one who escaped—and paused, and turned back, and saw, and cried out. This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today.

There are poems that stick with you like a song that won't stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart. Even after you think you've got a handle on a particular passage—how that imagery works to support the narrative, the interlocking patterns of the observed adn the unsaid—something elusive keeps sending you back to the page; and with each new reading, another layer of mystery will gently exhale and open up. Much like a favorite grandparent's parable-disguised-as-an-anecdote, the poem will unofld when you need it but least expect it, illuminating its revelations as you grow into the lessons life has to offer.