Spoke the Dark Matter, Michelle Whittaker
Michelle Whittaker’s Spoke the Dark Matter is an intimately carved, haunting window into the speaker’s Jamaican American heritage and her struggles with illness, healthcare, and romantic relationships. Examining decisions and challenges, in hindsight, Whittaker invites us to ask our future selves: How much does quietly submitting to injustice cost? How do we endure? How do we reconnect with resilience? Spoke the Dark Matter examines and redraws a “quiet surge of dystopia,” considering how the choices we make are so often entangled with our economic hardships. Whittaker’s collection is a quest through the divine, natural, emotional, and disrupted ecologies.
Lest we forget or lose faith in beauty’s utility in helping us navigate, or even, sometimes, if just a little bit, rattle the shitstorm, disturb the dystopic, let me point you to Michelle Whittaker’s beautiful Spoke the Dark Matter, whose impeccable, erudite, earthly and heartwrenched music—“I was sick with elegies,” or, “Then entered a thunder within the womb / beholding me awake,” or, “witnessing the last cardinal of the season / capturing the Bella moth / against the nectar in the moss” or, “O layers of the land and sea. Help me.”—will remind us.
–Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
Spoke the Dark Matter, Michelle Whittaker’s powerful second book, connects two “islands”—Jamaica and Long Island—through the poet’s ancestral and ecological grounding in both locales. Whittaker’s ear is commanding in this collection: music is leitmotif and replete in the language of the poems. Her virtuosic craft is also on display in the images and stories she weaves to engage the difficult subjects on which she trains her gaze—including racism, sexism, poverty, homelessness, illness, and grief. Yet perhaps the most impressive thing about Spoke the Dark Matter is Whittaker’s rhetorical vision, manifest in wide-seeing poems that bind struggle to survival.
–Shara McCallum, author of Madwoman and No Ruined Stone
Michelle Whittaker writes poems that are appealing for their intense scrutiny of origins, the natural world, and language. Reading this book is less an exercise in finding points of relatability but a calling forth to inhabit a rich and compelling imagination that may change how you see the world around you.
–Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022