The 1455 Author Series rolls on, and what better way to kick off this year’s programming than with poetry? Even better, I had the opportunity to speak with a poet whose new collection devastated me for all the right reasons. First order of business: if you consider yourself a fan of poetry, Cynthia Manick’s No Sweet Without Brine receives my highest recommendation. Here’s the thing: if you do not consider yourself a fan of poetry, or don’t think you “get” it (don’t worry you’re not alone), this is an ideal point of entry in ways that are guaranteed to surprise and delight you.
I know my simply saying “just buy this book” might not suffice (though it should), so let me offer some thoughts.
These poems travel through spaces and times (our own, and this earth’s) and the voices account for these interstices, with a confident, comforting tone established throughout. Manick is a tour guide through a universe filled with ancestors, spirits, recipes, joys, sorrows, and a refusal to keep things quiet. This makes the collection at once urgent and original, and easy to savor. Enjoyment abounds, but also enlightenment.
One comes to understand—and appreciate—that to read poems correctly one needs to slow down: savor, comprehend, let the images click to create feelings. But in 2024 even poetry aficionados can forget the best poems have the power to remind you, oblige you, to slow down.
While preparing for our conversation, and dog-earing page after page, I mulled over ways to properly convey my appreciation –not only for these poems, but the kinds of poetry collections that speak to me– and was struck by this realization: we tend to understandably give credit to the novel for its ability to world-build and contain multitudes. Of course, poetry also can do this (it should, it must); what fascinates me is that the poets I don’t respond to aren’t even trying, probably because they don’t care to; they can’t. The poems in this collection illustrate that the very personal can and, if the poet has engaged with the wider world of people, feelings, experiences, emotions, will invariably cover a great deal of ground that’s never self-indulgent navel gazing. Among other things, No Sweet Without Brine functions like the CV of a poet’s life, an artist’s life, a woman’s life, a black woman’s life, a deep and wonderful human being’s life.
Check out Cynthia’s work online and please enjoy our conversation, below.
1455 is always delighted to partner with our friends at D.C.’s historic Potter’s House. Find out more about them and their mission here, and support independent booksellers by purchasing your copies here.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Cynthia Manick’s sophomore poetry collection is an elegiac ode to Black womanhood in four parts, both soulful and celebratory. With piercing language, she captures the universality of life for a narrator who dares to exist between youthful remembrances and adults experiences. Each poem suggests a hint of sorrow, which make the celebration and recognition of Blackness in all ways that much sweeter. This book makes you agree to follow Manick’s mantra of “I want us living, not just alive.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad, 2023) which received 5 stars from Roxane Gay, editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. A storyteller at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and most recently the Brooklyn, Frye, and Rubin museums, Manick’s work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Brooklyn Rail, the Rumpus, and other outlets. She lives in Brooklyn, New York but travels widely for poetry.Visit her online at cynthiamanick.com.
