I’ve been spending some time with Harmony Holiday’s startling new book of poetry, Maafa, which is both verbally dense and free-flowing, terrifying and moving. Maafa is a Swahili word for “catastrophe” or “holocaust,” and the book’s lyric sequences are preoccupied with questions of how to understand, represent, and maybe even channel the overwhelming history of violence against Black lives. From Holiday’s vantage, the answers are by no means simple—at one point, a voice exclaims, “I’m reluctant to write this shit.” The difficulty of doing a catastrophe justice is entwined with the further tragedy of its potential co-option. The result is a field of fragments that oscillates between Ancient Egypt and “Fenty / Beauty ambassador”: destabilized but driven, at war with itself and with the narcotic of easy narratives, and ultimately visionary in its search.

Black music is a recurring subject in Holiday’s writing, and the book calls on a pantheon of sonic ancestors: Lena Horne, Sun Ra, Al Green, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. They are the points of contact by which a stolen history might be clawed back: “black    music    is   the   music   of    forensics // all   my   dead   friends  come  to  me   as  songs.” Resurfacings of stark violence crash into quicksilver wordplay: Holiday’s language is always restless as it cascades over itself, mischievous and never quite pin-downable, like the theme of a jazz chart that is taken up and reinvented in improvisation. The words run across the page in staggered spacings, as though written by a musician trying to hold the rhythm of the sentence in her pocket. Survival, Holiday tells us, is an ongoing struggle, something that is fought for between every word.

—David Wallace, Paris Review