Haymarket Books

103 pages, $16

Renowned poet Patricia Smith writes in the introduction to Kevin Coval’s newest collection of poems, L’Vis Lives, that his latest offering is a “relentless book, brave and uncomfortable.” Indeed, Coval’s collection is brave and forceful in the way it deals with race, exploring why suburban white kids would want to shed their identify and imitate black culture. It’s a topic on race that has rarely, if ever, been explored in contemporary poetry collections. Coval’s book, also dubbed “racemusic poems,” confronts the issue through recent music history, specifically Elvis, Vanilla Ice, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, all artists that owe their success to black music and what they took from it. Coval’s poems, while unsettling at times, highlight a truth about how white rappers and even rock ‘n roll pioneers made riches off of black music and culture.

Early on in the collection, Coval depicts a time when hip-hop was purer, during the beginning of the Ronald Reagan presidency, when the music had yet to burst into the mainstream. In the prosaic poem “the crossover,” he writes of a tapedeck and a walkman, music that “truthed” and was a “middle finger fuck you” to President Reagan who “sent uncle dave crazy back into the streets.” In the poem, and throughout the collection, Coval’s form imitates the rawness of early hip-hop. Like the poet’s other collections, he forgoes capitalization, even of names, places, and some titles of poems, thus making the poems a little more unrefined.

In the beginning of the collection, Coval also places his white speaker in front of a mirror, wishing he was cooler. In the poem “posing,” the young speaker confesses that his nose is still too big for his face and that his chin hairs “struggle for articulation.” A few clipped lines later, the speaker also admits that he wishes every muscle in his body were bigger. Anyone who suffered through an awkward adolescence, wishing for a newfound hipness and cool, can relate to the poem. Continue reading →