SINGER IN THE GRAY OF JEAN-MICHEL BY LYNN SHORTER

“Lynn Shorter’s poetry is pitched on the point of song, finding its place in the ear and throat to echo back through communities forged in Black struggle, art and counter narratives, and forwards into all the sonic possibilities of a world imagined otherwise….”
— Zoë Skoulding, author of A Marginal Sea

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From Clear Lake Solos

I made myself

they said a wistful transient

a fusion freak itinerant

who lives for duende

closeted in a Haitian Penny Band

They said I reigned a cappella

bloody knives ensnarled

in the copper braids of Sedna

for a fortnight

a mesa up from lobo camp

They said down sea

in my Seattle dreams a dust storm

of lost manatees provoked her

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Lynn Shorter’s Singer in the Gray of Jean-Michel is a pyrotechnical achievement. Shorter’s mastery of rhythm places her book among the very best of Black experimentalism and Afro-Futurism. Her poems move, coursing through a self that is actual, irreplaceable, and totally comfortable in its uniqueness. The poems push beyond identity into a form of sharing. The voice is filtered through whale-songs, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among other figures. Constantly surprising, the poems are both spontaneous and inevitable at the same time.
—Sean Singer, winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Today in the Taxi

Lynn Shorter’s poetry is pitched on the point of song, finding its place in the ear and throat to echo back through communities forged in Black struggle, art and counter narratives, and forwards into all the sonic possibilities of a world imagined otherwise. The space of the page is a score for unfolding identities, sinuous voicings transposing the fluidity of jazz into new keys of poetry. This is joyful and necessary work.
  —Zoë Skoulding, author of A Marginal Sea</p>

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Lynn Shorter is the author of Singer in the Gray of Jean-Michel, 2020 winner of the Slate Roof Press Chapbook Award/Elyse Wolf Prize.  In SGJM, she draws upon a jazz aesthetic to produce in poetry something akin to an Ornette Coleman solo.  Along with her late partner, Joan Behar, she is the co-founder of Reading the World, a UK based creative writing and performance program for marginalized groups and artists.  She is in her final months of completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Bangor University in Wales.