Throughout contemporary poetry collections, and in particular in the world of chapbooks, writers often seek to sustain a common tone, as if the entries considered in their entirety read like one big poem. Tonal consistency does not seem to be a goal of Mukethe Kawinzi's saanens, nubians, one lamancha, winner of the 2021 Quarterly West Chapbook Competition. In terms of setting and subject matter, yes, all of the poems deal with farming and animal husbandry, more specifically the experience of a Black speaker working on farms in the US South owned by white people. Tonally, however, the poems range from powerful and cutting examinations of how the racial dynamic invokes intergenerational traumas, for example the stunning first poem "are we slaves," to an almost Georgics-esque invocation of agrarian life in which issues of race recede from registering on the surface level, poems like "domestication debate" and "Grief" in particular introducing most readers to the experience of working with the titular goat breeds, to expressions of pure sensory joy, like the poem "comfort food."
     The poems even look extremely varied on the page, everything from rhyming couplets in the sing-songy "Dale's Shooting Lesson," to staid tercets in "bloodsport (1)," to long jagged tercets in "Feats," to columnar treatments in "nomenclature, determinative and otherwise," to prose blocks in "bloodsport (4)" and "cinco de mayo," to free verse in "all natural." Several of the poems make use of hybrid forms. "SB'F' 4 bird" takes the form of a personal ad with tear off tabs in which the speaker seeks a relationship with a "you" who's "winged, wise, with a weakness for blues bars, bitter beers, bedfast Sunday mornings with The Believer in the foreground and Gil Scott-Heron in the background." What might still not be clear: a bird. It vacillates with delightful abruptness between the comic and the lyric, silliness to something trickier. "Let's found our own language of throated laughter and glee-spun vespers, commit to strong Sapir-Whorf and never invent the word 'trauma'" soon gives way to "Species unimportant; I don't see breed." After calling it an "exotic rudeness" to omit greens from the poem "comfort food," the next page explodes in the gridded "So You Want to Talk About Comfort Food or I Make a Greens Alignment Chart After Being Compelled to Eat Tuna Casserole." Which looks like both what I'd expect and what I could never have imagined.
     Maybe "tonally unconstrained" would be a better way to describe the collection, because what I want to emphasize is that—when variety is working as compellingly as it is in saanens, nubians, one lamancha—what arises is a different kind of coherence. I think of Donald Barthelme's stories, not one of which reads like it was written by the same person. This type of consistency is also more like, you know, life—especially in a setting that is daily marked by the ambivalence and chaos of births, growth, deaths, satisfaction, pain, and the whims the weather, among other environmental factors.
     Many of the poems make playful use of white space, some verging on the concrete. Such is the case in what I found to be the most walloping poem in a mighty, mighty chapbook, "countryfolk." The poem is in four columns read across the gutter, the first three columns being only three lines long and the fourth being twenty-eight, leaving a large rectangle of white space covering most of the left side of the page. It's a one-sided dialogue, the speaker giving directions on where to turn, the subtext not staying sub for long:

So, the lines of the poem follow the given directions spatially, the words themselves becoming both warning and path to safety, the white space becoming the forbidden plot of land, becoming violent whiteness, wordlessness. (I shouldn't talk too much about encountering this poem the week sixteen-year-old Ralph Yarl's shooting for the crime of ringing the doorbell of 84-year-old Yep-You-Guessed-It showed America yet again just what a horror movie we're perpetuating. An additional tragedy is that a poem like "countryfolk" would resonate with current events most any week.) The shift in voice from colloquial commiseration to the language of institutionalized defense of such crimes is the poem's final chill: "toss him on / the list with pigs / & other villains: / topless cigarillo-smoking / harley-davidson fella / his fallow tilth / longgone to seed / & boundless rights / to protect his property."
      I'm sure that my coolness has caused me to miss out on a lot of good stuff, but I'm not accustomed to reading folded 8.5" x 11" pieces of paper from AWP booths. However, I serendipitously nabbed two freebies at Quarterly West's table that enhanced the world of this chapbook. Kawinzi's "minizines" DEATHS & MURDERS ON THE FARM and goat teats i have known are alternatingly playful, punk, and sober about the joys and the ethical ambivalence of such work. "killing animals is hard" the former admits, "i do not yet know what my future in animal murder is. / it feels important to help small farmers & to believe meat can come from humane places but i don't know. / i don't know. / i don't know." I could resort to some extratextual metaphor like B-sides or appendices, but instead I'll recommend getting your hands on these cloth-gobbling little kids if at all possible.
      After having read so many (lovely, lovely) poems about the trials inherent to tenure-track professorships, I'm so grateful for the unique world that this chapbook gives readers access to. saanens, nubians, one lamancha is one of the best poetry collections I've read in a long time.