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Review by Moira Richards http://www.cspi.org/womenspress d'bi.young is a young and already prolific Jamaican Canadian poet, performer and playwright with some few spoken-word CDs to her name as well. I've never before read anything like her poetry--she calls herself a dub poet and she explains dub so: "dub is word. dub is sound. dub is powah. dub poetry is / performance/poetry/politrix /roots/reggae." (pg. 4) The cover of art on black depicts the poet with shaven head, painted body and an arresting gaze. Evidently she is ready to perform her poetry and I open the book sure that I will encounter powerful words. And even though her unusual spelling and language usage take me a little while to read easily, I am not disappointed. A piece about sexual abuse, with a dedication for likkle debbie, narrates not only the story of a child survivor of rape by her uncle sam, but also
If you wondered about the name of the criminally predatory uncle in that poem, well yes. After reading the one quoted below, one that invokes another George's animal farm, I realised that d'bi.young is nothing if not outspoken in her political critique. The poem's dedication is for george w bush & george h w bush and reads in part,
The lines above demonstrate some of the power of young's words, and for more even of a treat I visited her website (www.dbiyoung.net) and listened to a recording of the entire poem with its musical accompaniment. Wow.
art on black collects work that d'bi.young has written and performed successfully over the last decade or so, with some of her new poems and includes too, an interesting, introspective biographical piece that gives the reader some sense of the person behind the performance persona. To close, I've culled a few lines from a thoughtful/thought-provoking poem in which the narrator, a black woman, makes love for the first time with miss merl, another black woman. She discovers that,
__________ Moira Richards: "Google 'Moira Richards' to find links to my essays on Women Abuse, my reviews of woman-authored books as well as to other writing and editing work I do for various print and e-publications. I can often be found lounging about the staff rooms of womenwriters.net, absolutewrite.com and moondance.org - usually sipping tea, sometimes Jack Daniels."
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