On Spec

Author: Tyrone Williams

Publisher: Omnidawn (2007)

Tyrone Williams reveals that every act of communication is a speculation, and that the spectacles we must use to see and assess it―those of our own particular condition and conditioning―are never without qualifying contour and coloration. Williams is a keen observer of the distortions of such lenses, as the titles of the two sections of this collection suggest―first is an “Eshuneutics” (interpretation purportedly infused with an Eshu’s sensibility). But the trickster’s eye can turn to mock even its own powers of analysis, as Williams deftly demonstrates by calling the second section “Pseudo-eshuneutics.” While the issues that Williams confronts come directly from an attempt say what it might mean to understand aspects of the African American condition of diaspora in the United States, these poems also implicate and illuminate the speculative enterprise that we each venture into whenever we attempt to articulate what we see and what we believe about it. At once immediately readable, intensely meditative, and brilliantly braced with philosophical reference, these tours through our human need to speak, and to understand, travel beyond the boundaries that constrain most poetry collections. Poems, plays, plays upon the making of such genre distinctions, are only some of the locations one will visit in these pages.