In the fifth line of “It’s San Francisco Summer,” poet stevie redwood calls readers to imagine “a fist of rage; a fist of roses; the fist erected / in solidarity or demand.” Like much of redwood’s debut collection, D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S (Sundress Publications: 2024), the lyric image of the responsive fist is not only unabashed, but also grounded by documentarian language that refuses to forfeit context. Later, the poem’s speaker reflects that “I can’t tell myself apart / from the ruins,” invoking dialectical images of decaying landscapes and exploited or ‘ruined’ bodies. Readers who insist on a neat line between art and politics are unlikely to appreciate this book’s major achievement: to personalize survival amid capitalist decay vividly enough to celebrate the “uppercut to the fascist” as a logical act of righteous anger.
redwood takes careful account of the material conditions that constrain lived experience. “Monday, headache, coffee, work. / Unholy screech of a trash truck / backing up,” begins “TRASH DAY TRIPTYCH OF THE MATERIAL,” offering a personal moment which the speaker later generalizes:
The bells
of St. Peter’s chime
their brutal measurements
over our lives. Our time, our value,
their rules. I light a Lucky Strike
& count American flags
against the skyline.
Objective images—bells and flags, coffee and cigarettes—are juxtaposed with class-conscious subjective commentary, as when the speaker “wake[s] up sweating with rage / over wage labor.” Similarly, in “F I R E E N G I N E S,” an exploration of California’s landscape that traces the chains of cause-and-effect driving wildfires, the speaker slowly establishes realistic imagery detail (“Burned-out tree trunks / stippling the earth’s soiled leather like a six-o’clock shadow”) before a sharp volta changes focus to abstract systems (“generations / of negligence & genocidal engines” and “the warfare of property,” to name a few). Here, human bodies are not only subjects with agency, but also objects at the mercy of what exists before and around them.
Empathy for circumstance is an indispensable aspect of redwood’s project. In
“T U E S D A Y B L U E S,” the speaker catalogues real-world conflicts and their (dis)connections with the ways people vote:
No matter who assaulted whom.
No matter what apartheid. What borders,
what prison spending, what fraud.
What bathroom bills, what surveillance,
what mining, what war? No matter
who owns stock in Lockheed;
no matter who it will kill. Keep killing—
keep voting blue. . . .
Additional scenes of a conflicted world are interspersed among a place-bound narrative, in which the speaker interacts with neighborhood children, before the concluding lines (“god, // I could be anybody—”) press upon readers that place and circumstance of birth are not a choice. Separately, in
“Y O U T E L L M E Y O U D O N ’ T W A N T T H I S L I F E,” redwood’s speaker overlays the dictates of capital as one more layer of circumstance:
do you know i
& you
are interchangeable
in the thesaurus
as on the timeclock
did you know
we mean
the same thing
Despite frequent use of enjambment, the spirit of redwood’s work operates in the American tradition of Walt Whitman’s long lines. Both writers cast a massive net of language onto the surface of the world, hauling in troves of mundane detail that can, at times, overwhelm.
There are multiple ways to read the “danger” in the book’s title, but all of them return to those little, insistent facts of daily life. Bodies can of course be dangerous for their interior subjects, in the sense that one might inherit a biological susceptibility, or be born into a marginalized social position. redwood also critiques bodies that create danger for other subjects, as in
“IF I TELL YOU THERE IS MORE LUST,” in which “somewhere / a politician is lying / asleep among corpses,” and “a CEO / is somewhere sucking / the white from every bone.” Multiple unkind references to Jeff Bezos further sharpen the point.
The most chilling interpretation, however, is exemplified in the poem “D O G S H I T,” a three-page narrative about neighbors, gardens, and the insidious division sown by fascist frames of thought. The speaker skewers liberal hypocrisy (“We promised to clean up the neighborhood, / announces the mayor from doorknob flyers / littering the sidewalk, and we’re succeeding”) while developing the character of a nice neighbor. The poem’s conclusion juxtaposes previously introduced lines, about killing invasive insects, with images of homeless people and the neighbor’s actions:
If you see them,
comes the echo,
Crush them—
hands grinding,
teeth glinting,
eyes bright
& knife-sharp—
so keen
to cleanse life
from her doorstep.
Description of the neighbor’s bright-eyed extermination subtly critiques the fascist mindset’s reliance on having out-groups to malign. In this sense, what makes bodies dangerous is that none are immune to fascist overtures—that every nice neighbor risks becoming a predator, wittingly or not, if they are sufficiently disconnected from the realities of other subjects.
An inspiring way to read the “danger” is contained within the formatting used for the book’s headings: concrete anagrams, in which typeface identifies a second word inside the contours of the first. The “anger odes” buried within “dangerous bodies” are redwood’s gestures, both lyrical and argumentative, toward a revolutionary honesty and empathy. “REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #1312,” for example, offers readers specific advice:
find people motivated by rage & people
motivated by love & people who understand
these are often the same. Find artists who care
about what art cannot do.
In this framework, “the hungry blade turning / my gut / into a chorus of warning” (referenced in “R U P T U R E D E N T A T A”) is an indictment of the one who turns the blade, not the one who reacts to their body’s warning systems. The implicit (and encouraged) danger here is that bodies who react in unison, translating anger into concerted effort, can imperil the grip of the capitalist class.
By placing lyric and documentarian modes in dialogue with each other, redwood’s language echoes the dialectic between subjects and material reality. Detail, pathos, and critique combine in a way that may not please audiences predisposed to maintaining appearances of neutrality. As a call to action and resistance, however, this book is a successful and quite timely reminder that rage against injustice is righteous—even necessary—for nurturing a world of roses.
D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S by stevie redwood, Sundress Publications, 2024, 103 pages, $12.99, paper.
Purchase link: https://sundress-publications.square.site/product/d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s-b-o-d-i-e-s-a-n-g-e-r-o-d-e-s-by-stevie-redwood-pre-order-/194?cs=true&cst=custom
D.W. Baker is a poet and editor from St. Petersburg, Florida. His criticism appears in Philly Poetry Chapbook Review and The Marrow (Broken Antler), among others, while his poetry appears in Washington Square Review, ballast, Identity Theory, and many more. He reads for several mastheads including Variant Lit and Libre. See more of his work at www.dwbakerpoetry.com