A Shiver in the Leaves

Shiver In The Leaves / Luther Hughes / September 2022 / BOA Editions, $17 (paperback)

Crows swirl and gather in Luther Hughes’ A Shiver in the Leaves. As death-omens and figures of blackness, the birds flit through poems that sway with the tenderest desire and still with mourning. This debut collection from the Seattle-based poet memorializes black boys killed by police and black boys and men who were recent victims of anti-gay hate crimes (Tamir Rice, Giovanni Melton, Dwone Anderson-Young, and Ahmed Said among others). Against the pervasiveness of racist and homophobic violence, the poems in this collection ask if the spaces of healing and intimacy provided by queer domesticity can serve as a sort of refuge from the world. I think, in particular, of the poems “When Struck by Night” and “Making the Bed,” which appear one after another partway through the book, the former singing, “Everywhere there you are / with your eyes a warless country.” Just as attentively as they paint the soothing weightiness of this love, Hughes’ poems elegize the dead they name and consider the futility of such a project: “it is misleading / to sing in the presence of death.” Still, every poem-approaching-hymn of the collection may ask, what else is one to do?

Read these poems plucked from the trembling auras of sex and death; sway some time in their final quietness. 

-- Yeukai Zimbwa