The Kin of Nakedness

The debut collection from Adroit Managing Editor Chris Crowder, The Kin of Nakedness interrogates the ethics of complaining and self-work beginning with a lens focused on body image. Structured by sections that complicate the biblical definitions of servitude--being Christ's hands and feet--and a long ars poetica, the speaker risks toward honesty as he explores his struggles and privileges as a Black and biracial man. "Digging for everything I have to write into my flesh," Crowder works to witness the harm done to himself and others who are competing for recognition. Seeking to understand these internal and external struggles, he embodies characters, including benched quarterbacks and Jimmy Fallon, while reckoning with fractured subjects like greedy pastors and alternate universes.

In wrestling with despair, Crowder neither refuses reality nor surrenders to nihilism. The speaker of "I'm Not Always Sulking, Resting My Elbow on a Well" admits to the temptation to surrender, saying, "I can't trick my anxious ass into thinking that things aren't better than this," but the elaboration of "this" becomes a litany that contradicts the insufficiency of this life: "My corgi, Eden. My parents' garden of beans, collard greens, and spicy peppers. Reacting to heat: it's actually got good flavor to it. So do the worst days." Crowder has a signature gift for distilling the bizarre beauty of this existential maelstrom, the succor beside the suffering. He achieves an astonishing inverse transmogrification that shows man capable of God's metamorphosis: not the body into bread, but the abyss into being. "Before I had skin, I hated it. / The idea." But, though our nakedness terrifies us, the mortification of the flesh is its capacity to feel every excruciating and ecstatic thing. "Lord, // you asked me what sense / could you not bear / to lose? My answer, now, is touch."