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Book Review: Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed
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Review
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A Review of Justin Phillip Reed's Indecency
Justin Phillip Reed sutures language, “smudged reflections, / [and] histories flattened” in Indecency, a collection of scathing testimonies that demonstrate what it means to be a Black, queer individual navigating through heteronormative, white constructs. Reed is unapologetic in his examinations of how the Black body is a subject of racial and sexual violence, forcing us to “carry the carnal weight” that devastates the marginalized time and time again. In “Witness to the Woman I Am Not,” Reed gives voice to objectified women as an act of solidarity and unravels how they are engulfed in figurative and literal white spaces after introducing each passage with “(in which all this white is my gaze).” Following this recurring parenthetical is a series of black text blanketed in the whiteness of the page, almost swallowing “the labial-lingual demand of speech” to the point of erasure. The speaker deconstructs the woman further as the piece progresses, referring to her as “shorty” in the first passage, to “‘and she’” and “‘of her,’” to “‘snatched’ and ‘muffled’”—but, by the conclusion, the woman becomes a metonym: a “dress, a worried mess of splinters, somehow yet a dress.’” Reed then leads us to a morgue, where we become a witness to “missing Black girls” swathed in a “body bag somewhere” in “Pushing up onto its elbows, the fable lifts itself into fact.” There is no room for discomfort as Reed depicts the devastating reality of the “disposability of Black girls who are prone to disappearance,” and how “Outrage, too, has a way of being disappeared.” We are left haunted by the ghosts of abducted Black women underneath these white sheets, waiting to mourn another Black girl to go missing only to repeat the cycle of them turning into a statistic. Women are also othered and dehumanized by the patriarchal society they reside in, and Reed highlights this feminist lens before transitioning to the queer perspective in “Performing a Warped Masculinity en Route to the Metro,” “Take It Out of the Boy,” “Any Unkindness,” and “Exchange,” among others. These interconnected poems confront gender performativity, which is showcased through the speakers confessing that they are “tired / of pretending” to be a gay, closeted lover in “Take It Out of the Boy” and later admitting how “the mind threads the sting into memory” in “Exchange.” The blurring between masculinity and femininity is seen through the speaker’s connection with the sister and mother as figures who invoke “a synonymy: to protect and to devour.” This dichotomous relationship of both safeguarding his femininity and becoming emasculated is an internal struggle the speaker attempts to fathom. The focus on the female body shifts when the speaker acknowledges the following: what the young divorcé means to do with me The pressure of society coerces the speaker’s lover to deny his sexuality; and, as a result, the speaker’s own self-worth and acceptance of their own identity is diminished. The speaker becomes a subject of shame caught in the web of gendered and sexual politics.
Reed stitches tension, resentment, and grief in “The Fratricide”—a harrowing account of how Black bodies are conglomerate, a startling contrast to how easily identifiable white people are. The poem is damning in its opening lines: “I was coerced into my brother’s murder. Because / I loved him I was made to live for him. Inside him. / As him.” The repetition at the end of the poem creates an uneasy cadence as the speaker cries out: Are we brothers. Aren’t we our brother. This commentary on how Black people are indistinguishable from each other, in life or in death, is layered with suppression, residual anger, and a call for action. The brutalities committed against the Black community are something we continue to witness daily, but Reed refuses to be desensitized by the countless names that have been forged into history because of racially charged violence. “The Fratricide” is a block of text framed around a bolded message: “how can you still not look at his face.” To Reed, it is impossible to ignore these injustices; to turn our backs on these lived realities is inexcusable.
Indecency is a stunning collection lined with unsettling truths as well as fragments of blood and bone. Reed’s craft is undeniable, but one must explicate his poetry like a mortician to fully experience its visceral nature—one must have the ability to uncover the dead without fear. As Reed laments in “About a White City”: “They say there are those / who have never / felt terror.” Indecency is a book that demands to be read on its own terms, and the obscene snapshots Reed strings together will leave you feeling haunted. |
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Patricia Damocles is the Managing Editor for Jet Fuel Review who is majoring in English Language & Literature with a minor in Creative Writing. She is also a member of Sigma Tau Delta’s Rho Lambda chapter and a Wolny Writing Residency fellow. What she strives to achieve as a JFR editor is to give passionate, aspiring writers a platform to express themselves. As someone who has had the opportunity to be published in a previous issue, she is aware of how empowering it is to have her voice acknowledged in the world of literature. In her free time, she enjoys reading poetry and short stories, and making memories with her friends, family, and cats.
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