Make Me Rain

November 23, 2020
Giovanni (Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid) celebrates in her poignant 20th collection art as redemptive of traumas past and present, illuminating the ways in which “the blues is our encyclopedia.” With a mind attuned to ironies, Giovanni considers refuge from systemic injustice: “I remember sitting/ During the age of segregation/ In the ‘colored’ car/ Where the Pullman Porters looked out/ For my sister and me/ And we didn’t understand we were/ Not wanted/ We loved it.” In “When I Could No Longer,” speakers affirm the healing power of community against personal abuse, elegizing godmothers, grandmothers, educators and friends, including the late Toni Morrison. The most memorable moments in the collection reveal the cutting directness that made her a laureate of the Black Arts Movement: “The blues may talk about/ My man/ Or my woman/ Who left me/ Or took my money/ And is gone/ But what they mean/ Is I was stolen/ In an African war.” Similarly, in “Lemonade Grows From Soil, Too,” the speaker wryly notes, “Everybody wants to confuse love with sex. Ask Bill Cosby about that.” Such pleasurable jolts offset the collection’s more rhetorically slack moments and reinforce Giovanni’s unapologetic commitment to documenting both injustice and joy.

Nikki Giovanni's slightly raspy, slightly sibilant voice draws listeners into this important collection of poetry and prose. Letting her poet's sense guide her tempo, Giovanni wrings the humor, anger, and sorrow out of being Black in America. In "And So It Comes to This," Giovanni's mocking tone is the perfect match for a scathing indictment of white men and their obsession with a false supremacy. Her palpable anger recalls the death of Michael Brown in "Ferguson: the Musical," and her heart seems to be breaking as she describes "the brother" getting up in the dark to drive to the Million Man March. Warm tones express themes of quilts and songs and love. As Giovanni tells us, "All is transition and love is forever." S.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine