I'm Always So Serious

Karisma Price’s debut, I’m Always So Serious, is an address to and through various beloveds. Poems are styled after poets like Jamaal May and Gwendolyn Brooks, and braid in lyrics by artists including Deniece Williams and Curtis Mayfield. Several are marked for an auntie, a grandmother, friends, and others held in similarly intimate regard, as in a poem dedicated to Renisha McBride, Miriam Carey, Shantel Davis, and Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones—four black women and girls who were murdered, three by police, one by a white homeowner from whom she sought help. 

The collection’s care for the dead revolves around names and naming: “I can never write a love poem that doesn’t end // with death so here is a list of the dead: Jackie, / Franklin, Maria …". To honor their names is decisive, for “Who would the living be / without the dead in the ground?” In “Buckjump,” written for “the souls of the enslaved buried near the sugar cane fields in West Baton Rouge Parish,” names are impossible to know; instead, Price uses collage and rhythm to summon New Orleans second line parades in writing:

I want to do right by us. I’ll say it plain: 
Everything left of the slaves: sugar. 
Near the sugar, everything left. 

After the speaker has left New Orleans and moved to New York, her mother sends winter packages despite protestations: “I tell her to / save her money. As always, she refuses.” When the speaker imagines the possibility of home ownership (“I want to live // in the house I cannot own because / I am not white. Forgive me.”), it is back home: “in the winters I dream / of owning a multifloored mansion / in New Orleans.” 

Various persona poems recast familiar stories: Demeter becomes a black woman speaking to Persephone, characters from If Beale Street Could Talk are embedded into the Odyssey, and James Booker is the addressee of one poem and the speaker of the next. Throughout the collection, the poet’s influences and audiences are necessarily collective and are continuously thanked.