Claim Tickets for Stolen People

body broke but body builds
mountain from matchsticks body
burned but body bends time
’round a wrist body bend words

These alliterative lines open “all-american black body,” a poem from Quintin Collins’s second collection, Claim Tickets for Stolen People, which examines the Black American experience. In “Dave Chappelle Ponders Necromancy in South Africa After Quitting Chappelle’s Show” Collins takes his consideration of the Black body to a darker, more visceral place, asking:

What would you do if you faced a pandemonium
of parrots who recited a spell to revive a dead man
in a dead joke? What if you realized your rot,
that you, too, are a puppet of necrotic flesh?

Elsewhere, the poet turns to more mundane concerns, like the busyness of an airport baggage claim (“Now thud. Now stumble. / Now tumble into a drum roll.”), but his reflections in this domain often fall flat. 

Threaded through this book are poems about the impending arrival of a newborn child in which the speaker grapples with the dangerous reality into which their child will be born. In a moment of intergenerational recognition, it’s the speaker’s mother who, “[f]rom halfway across America, warns me / to exercise caution,” because

She knows what scopes and iron sights frame Black bodies.
She watched cops choke Eric Garner on a New York street. 
She watched cops shoot Tamir Rice. Rekia Boyd’s killer
resigned before he could be fired […]

In “Sonogram,” the speaker observes with wonder and trepidation the images on the screen. 

And this is a hand. What will you devise?
For playground bullies, a weapon?
For the weak, to wage your own wars?
Open, raised for police, pistols drawn?
Closed, raised for pride
in your Blackness?