Blue Hallelujahs by Cynthia Manick

Blue Hallelujahs Reviews

• 
  Jennifer

  Soulful, vivid, entrancing. A great way to start the day is with some good a** poetry.
• 
  Adrian

  full of meaning and pleasure and sharing it and learning as you go
• 
  Kim

  Wow - love this beautiful emotionally honest collection - highly recommend it.
• 
  Elvis Alves

  THIS REVIEW WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE COMPULSIVE READER
  Cynthia Manick’s Blue Hallelujahs is an impressive debut poetry collection. Manick’s talent shines here. Her poetry is like a good meal, worth savoring. She describes small things in big ways. This approach draws the reader into the landscape of her poetry. In The Shop Washington Built, laughter is described as “the size of two small ships” (8) and strength is the ability “to hold lightening inside/grow daughters among/shifting currents” (Things I Carry Into The World, 16).
  
  The collection is peopled with characters that feel familiar. One surmises that this is the case because of their influence on Manick’s life (and her ability to capture this with words). Manick shares her grandmother’s wisdom, “…they fear our womb/the reckoning hive of dark/berries and stems” (The Sun Don’t Know, 13). A strong yet struggling mother appears in some of the poems as in Mind The Gap (17) and Tapping at Mama’s Knees (28). Here is a stanza from the former.
  
  Does she know how the world works?
  How some of us are born without 40 acres
  and the weight of a mule on their chest. Like my mother
  and Monday mornings—boarding the F train and two buses
  with two children, her own negro caravan. A sonata full of low-watt
  clinics and hurling vowels like swords. How I often waited
  in those long-ass lines
  and imagined myself a boy, a whirlwind digging in the muck
  where only muscles and gold matter.
  
  Tapping Mama’s Knees too calls us into the harsh reality that is poverty (the female character migrates to the North from the American South to escape Jim Crowism) but there is a gentle feel to it. This is the case because the mother is drawn to music, a salve to, or at least an expression of, her pain, “While the body craves light/mama wanted the dark arms of trumpeters/watching veins pull notes together/was like an island being born.” Herein lies the beauty of Manick’s work. She lets you into her world to the degree that you recognize yourself in what she presents. The same can be said of music, like the blues.
  
  Can some things stand? Can some things change?
  Or will you banish her, like your other pets—the mammoth,
  the bison, and the dinosaur? (To Speak About What Isn’t Spoken, 40)
  
  Here we see the threat of extinction. This is found in other poems in the collection, including in one of its strongest, The Museum, where Manicks is pictured on display, “my carcass in this museum…my fluted bones dance, say hi, in the last great African mammal display” (72). This is the gaze, how others see Manick, a doing she wants to dismantle with words. The title poem begins with “In the right light I’m beautiful” (Blue Hallelujahs from Hand, 73).
  
  Manick sees herself in the footsteps of great female African American poets,“ When I doubt I look to Gwendolyn, Phyllis, and Lucille” (How a Poet Carries Weight, 60). This is true. Her collection signals the maturing of a powerful voice and is worth reading.
• 
  Anne

  Just gorgeous. There's a lot of underlines in this book--I kept finding beautiful lines I didn't want to forget. This is important, moving poetry that looks deeply at womanhood and race.
• 
  Fatima E.

  "I want to take a blade and cut
  the edge of this round red wound.
  Have daughters born not ready
  to fear, but ready to pick up a spade,
  dig a ditch, and knife a man."
• 
  Lauren

  My favorite sections were the last two: "The Secret Of Living In This Body" and "Blue Hallelujahs." They felt so alive and fresh and sad and thrumming with story.