[In the following review, Myles states that while Magic City "starts off a little sticky," its "information is unforgettable."]

Yusef Komunyakaa, an African American poet whose last book, Dien Cai Dau, drove a shaft of light into the inarticulate spectacle of the Vietnam War, has now taken on a story easy to mistell: childhood. Magic City is the name of this foray. It starts off a little sticky, in my opinion. I don't think Komunyakaa feels confident with the first person—certainly not a re-assembled first person, like that of the speaker in the first poem: "Venus's-flytraps":

       The tall flowers in my dreams are
       Big as the First State Bank,
       & they eat all the people
       Except the ones I love.
       They have women's names,
       With mouths like where
       Babies come from. I am five.

Komunyakaa has said of this work that he was "trying to throw myself back into the emotional situation of the time, and at the same time bring a psychological overlay that juxtaposes new experiences alongside the ones forming the old landscape inside my head." This is an elaborate construction, but to my mind a "child voice" is almost no voice at all. It lives in the description of one's memories. And what's stellar about these poems are lines like "flesh-colored stones along a riverbed." Whose flesh? The ambiguity asks nothing and everything of the reader. Komunyakaa's physical descriptions of things are bursting with matter-of-factness, a sublime flatness that delivers the unconscious unscathed, because it's a participant rather than an invited guest.

Mostly, he lets the information speak. Quiet rage informs the telling of "History Lessons," which in one of three stanzas describes the former site of a lynching—"No, I couldn't see the piece of blonde rope … the / Flayed tassel of wind-whipped hemp knotted around a limb / Like a hank of hair." Later, Komunyakaa gives an account of the murder of a young black boxer who was "running & punching the air at sunrise / how they tarred and feathered him & dragged the corpse / Behind a Model T … / How they dumped the prizefighter on his mother's door-step … two days later three boys / Found a white man dead … in blackface." The overt content of this poem, and much of the work in this book, is about living under a system of racism, but what's astonishing about Komunyakaa's handling of racism is that every hair of the poem (when he's on) is about that, too. The blondness of the hanging rope tells more about the perpetrators and their victim than any blow-by-blow. In its shorthand, it humanizes the revulsion, making this white reader see the horror of the world in the hues it really comes in.

In the course of Komunyakaa's telling, the ante is raised word by word—the "young boxer" becomes a "prizefighter" who is then rendered lifeless and placed, empty of future meaning, on his mother's doorstep. What could be worse? By the time we get to the man in blackface whose head is tenderly resting "on a clump of sedge," we're simply numbed. Komunyakaa's system of signs and codes is as strongly installed in his work as racism is in society at large; one can't help but share in his fascination with the stray mysteries the system of black / white, male / female yields. These objects of his gaze are delivered point-blank: "Boys in Dresses" is an almost ceremonial poem about just what the title says. "We felt the last kisses / Our mothers would give us / On the mouth …" In "Fleshing-out the Season," a man has two wives: one black, one white. The women are friends and the three live in peace and he sends their children to college and they divide his body when he dies: "One sprinkled him / Over the Gulf of Mexico, / & the other put him under roots / of pigweed beside the back gate—/ Purple, amaranthine petals, / She wore in her hair on Sundays." Such oddities glisten like myth rather than having any moral purpose. Which is another aspect of his collection I adore. The title keys it too: Magic City is more than a bit of an amusement park, with an almost Angela Carter perspective on a southern Black youth. Thereby glints its horror and its power and the information is unforgettable.