A Reader’s Guide to In To Me See

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There is a curtain at the beginning of In To Me See.

Not a metaphorical curtain politely waiting for the reader to lift, either. This is a proper theatrical entrance: The Set (First Curtain). The book announces itself as a performance before it has really told you what kind of performance you are watching. Then comes the first declaration:

Yet Still I Write.

That turns out to be an important clue.

In To Me See is not particularly interested in staying in one place. It moves between poem and prose, English and Jamaican speech, Spanish and wordplay, comedy and grief, sexuality and spirituality, observation and introspection. It can be playful on one page and meditative on the next. It can be formally disciplined and then deliberately unruly. It can talk about the body, the Bible, a bus stop, a photograph, a mountain, a mother, a father, a lover, a racehorse, a cockerel, a cedar tree, or a childhood inheritance—and somehow keep returning to the same territory:

the self in the act of becoming conscious of itself.

The prologue describes the book as an “exhibition” of an emerging writer's lyrical consciousness: not a collection intended to present only finished or exemplary poems, but a deliberately lean selection offering a representative portrait of a mind at work.

That makes the architecture especially revealing.

First, the curtain rises

The opening sequence is almost an invitation into someone's interior.

Yet Still I Write establishes writing as release, play, compulsion and transformation. The poem famously turns writing into a kind of bleeding: what enters the writer must eventually come back out through language.

Then An Esoteric’s Dream takes the reader somewhere more enclosed. The heart becomes a guarded castle, complete with gates, vines and formidable architecture. Entry is difficult. Those who make it inside are not merely admitted to a room; they approach the hearth of the soul.

Then comes Caparazón—a shell.

Protection has its uses. But a shell can become a prison, and hiding can protect the mind while starving the spirit. The placement matters: An Esoteric’s Dream (Part 1), Caparazón, An Esoteric’s Dream (Part 2). The shell sits inside the dream like a hinge.

Then the book opens outward again.

Home makes the body itself into territory: home, kingdom, boundary, political and personal space. Atascado follows with another kind of enclosure—the experience of being stuck—while bringing Spanish directly into the movement of the poem.

The reader has already encountered several versions of the same problem:

How does one inhabit the self without becoming imprisoned inside it?

And then—

Through my EYES

The first act changes the angle.

The reader is now looking outward.

Jamaican Pantomime can turn something as ordinary as waiting for a bus into theatre. Atmosphaera transforms atmosphere into a fickle spouse and connects the amniotic sac with the atmospheric world entered at birth. Heights of Great Men turns the act of interpretation itself into material for poetry.

That last move is characteristic of the collection.

The poems do not merely observe the world. They observe observation.

A tree is not simply a tree. A photograph is not simply a photograph. A landscape can become memory. A body can become architecture. A literary critic can become a character inside a poem about literature. A song can become an image. An image can become a meditation on freedom.

In Enter Freedom, the reader encounters an ekphrasis for Redemption Song: bodies, garden gates, nakedness and emancipation converge until the final word lands almost like a shout.

Elsewhere, Jamaica is not simply described. It is heard.

Bamboo, landscape, vernacular, music, movement and cultural reference enter the poems without requiring the collection to stop and announce itself as “Jamaican poetry.” Jamaican language is part of the book's operating system.

And then there is Flash, where the visual encounter becomes memory, and English gives way to Spanish. The collection's multilingualism is therefore not merely ornamental. Language itself becomes part of the field of perception.

By the end of the first act, the reader has been taught something important:

to look closely.

But looking is not enough.

Through my MIND

The second act turns the gaze inward.

If EYES asks what the world looks like, MIND asks what happens when all of that material gets inside.

Wood Pecker opens this territory through questions—about fear, identity, love, purpose, closeness, growth and the enormous problem of figuring out what exactly one is supposed to be doing with a life.

One question cuts particularly deep:

“What am I? Not who am I?”

The distinction matters.

This act is not simply about identity as a social label. It is concerned with being, desire, breath, mortality, confinement and possibility.

Let Me Breathe reduces things almost to their physical foundation. Breath becomes grounding. The Wings In My Chest turns breathing into flight: something in the chest rises and falls, aspiring upward while remaining attached to the body.

The poems repeatedly return to this tension:

flight and grounding; freedom and confinement; body and spirit.

My Race turns the question toward racial identity and the distance between how a person understands himself and how others classify him.

Where Will We Go pushes further, toward death and whatever might exist beyond the body. The body can be home; it can also be cage.

Then the heart itself becomes a captive creature.

In Blood Bay Colt, it is a racehorse in a cage—Mi corazón en su jaula—full of movement that cannot quite be released.

And the act becomes increasingly physical.

Dance Hall turns animal courtship into choreography. Bumpa Cock Up brings Jamaican bawdiness and comic energy into formal verse. Virgin Girl, Baby Yuh Draw Meh, Gitana and the surrounding poems continue the collection's fascination with sexuality, attraction, performance and desire.

By the time the reader reaches FAFO, the public self and private self are staring at each other.

Reputation is not necessarily biography.

A person seen from outside is not necessarily a person known.

And perhaps that is one of the central concerns of the entire collection:

How much of a person can ever be seen from the outside?

Which makes the next movement almost inevitable.

Intermission

Then, suddenly:

Xtra! Xtra! Read All About It!

The theatrical machinery announces a break.

But this is not really an escape from the book's concerns. It is a recalibration.

In°spire returns to breath. On The Banks of The Nile shifts the scale outward. Potentiality asks what a life might become—and whether the life being lived is actually one's own. Will You Be Love? expands the question into something enormous: what is love when considered through principle, society, theology, physiology, emotion and individuality?

The intermission therefore feels less like stopping than like changing the question.

The book has looked.

The book has thought.

Now it asks what all of that consciousness is for.

And then the heart takes over.

Through my HEART

The third act is where the collection becomes especially intimate.

If the first act is about perception and the second about interior consciousness, the third is about attachment.

People enter the centre of the book.

Bonfire, Conductor and Dance brings together desire, Christianity, shame, dance, artistry and transformation. The poem's concluding image gives the section its particular heat: something has been changed through encounter, and what emerges is blazing.

To The Girls I’ve Loved compresses romantic history into a tanka.

How The Fatherless Fathered Me turns inheritance into a question of responsibility: what does it mean to receive wounds, patterns and teachings from those who came before, and then become responsible for what gets carried forward?

The collection then moves through grandparents, mothers, fathers, family, memory and death.

See More remembers a grandfather.

A Letter to Mom speaks directly to a deceased mother, combining English, Jamaican language, Spanish-inflected play, biblical echoes, humour and grief.

The Day My Father Died and Grief continue that confrontation with absence.

And then comes Losing My Religion.

Here the language of spiritual doubt becomes a voyage: storms, ships, navigation and the search for direction. The question is no longer simply whether inherited belief can be maintained. It becomes a question of how one might construct a life after questioning the structures that once gave it direction.

That concern with construction leads beautifully into to peel back.

The poem uses the language of books and libraries to imagine intimacy. Another person becomes a text to be entered—not merely physically, but inwardly.

The collection has returned to its oldest problem:

What does it mean to get inside another person?

And perhaps, by extension:

What does it mean to let someone get inside you?

The Final Curtain

The book now announces its ending.

Naturally, it becomes more complicated.

The Closing Act brings together Maskulinity, Closeted, Bamboozled Jamrockian, Me, Myself & I, CeCeCe (And Away We Go) and Rebel Lion.

These poems gather many of the collection's earlier concerns—gender, identity, Jamaica, isolation, self-definition, comfort, confidence, freedom and persistence.

Me, Myself & I is especially striking as a late-book statement of selfhood. The ghazal moves through solitude, expectations of marriage and family, desire, talent and individual direction before arriving at its stark final formulation.

Then CeCeCe (And Away We Go) compresses the matter almost into an aphorism: skin, body, home, hometown, homeland. Comfort is acknowledged—but so is the danger of becoming too comfortable.

And then comes Rebel Lion.

The final principal poem does not resolve the collection by saying that everything has been understood.

Instead, it moves.

Rise up.

Keep going.

Keep vision.

Keep faith.

Do not stray from the path.

The book ends not with arrival but with momentum.

Which makes Yet Still I Write, all the way back on page 8, look increasingly like the collection's hidden refrain.

Not:

I have figured myself out.

Not:

Here is the final version of me.

But:

Yet still I write.

There is still something to investigate.

Still something to question.

Still something to laugh at.

Still something to mourn.

Still something to desire.

Still something to translate.

Still something to become.

And then the book refuses to end

There is a Final Curtain.

Then there is Brawta!

Bonus Scenes.

Seven more pieces.

The joke is structurally perfect.

The book has just staged its ending and then turns around:

Actually, one more thing.

Blinded Faith. At The Velorio. Renaissance Man. Walking ‘Neath the Rainbow. That Tearful Salute. A Reel, A Reel, A Reel. Hadda Grow Up.

The “bonus” material feels like an afterlife for the theatrical structure. The curtain has fallen, but the consciousness behind the curtain is evidently not finished generating material.

And perhaps that is the most useful way to enter In To Me See.

Do not expect one voice in the narrow sense.

Expect one consciousness speaking through many voices.

Expect the serious poet and the joker to occupy the same book. Expect the intellectual and the sensualist. The Jamaican and the cosmopolitan. The Christian inheritance and the questioning believer. The grieving son and the lover. The observer and the performer. The formalist and the experimenter.

Expect poems that want to be looked at carefully and poems that want to be heard aloud.

Expect Spanish to appear without asking permission.

Expect Jamaican language to refuse translation when translation would diminish it.

Expect bodies.

Expect books.

Expect breath.

Expect blood.

Expect cages and wings.

Expect theatre.

Expect jokes in places where jokes perhaps have no business being.

Expect grief to arrive beside wordplay.

And, above all, expect a collection that keeps turning one thing into another.

A photograph becomes memory.

A bus stop becomes theatre.

A shell becomes imprisonment.

A body becomes home.

A heart becomes a horse.

Breath becomes wings.

A relationship becomes a library.

A religious crisis becomes a voyage.

A life becomes a performance.

And a book becomes an exhibition.

That is the peculiar pleasure of In To Me See.

It does not ask the reader to enter a perfectly furnished literary room and admire the arrangement.

It opens the doors of a house that is still being built.

There are rooms devoted to sight.

Rooms devoted to thought.

Rooms devoted to love.

Rooms where Jamaica is speaking.

Rooms where Spanish suddenly appears.

Rooms full of laughter.

Rooms full of ghosts.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, the writer is still writing.

The curtain rises.

The curtain falls.

Then—

Brawta!

There is still another scene.