Darryl / Dadou / Baron Wawa
Darryl / Dadou / Baron Wawa is a Port-au-Prince born Haitian-American who studied Photography and Creative Writing. He enjoys chocolate and good books. That said, maybe a movie is a good book. He loves to work with images and words and their pairing.
In line and prose the poems blunt with humor and cynicism, in this dance that’s like having sex with someone new, or listening to anecdotes about your mom’s love life: it makes you uncomfortable at times, but you come back, it itches...
And you, my ear of wood
separate floor and sky
floor from sky
and hear my sin as lack
on the midline
These paired repetitions in both stanzas make the lines more permanent, like a magic mirror effect and affect. Subtle as a disaffected kid, they play with mature audacity.
As a symbol, a hand becomes a want, a yearn, a chain, a command, a judgment, a labor, a seizure of sharing, affection, and property. The hand, the biological equivalent to the symbol of gesture, the means of participating in the play of life, the gesture.
The author is a master of proportion, a noteworthy quality, so that the bulk of the main theme (loss) and the other themes are revealed almost like video fades. The lines are clear, simple, precise, eloquent and politely unforgiving.
Impulse and Warp nobly attempts the impossible: to describe the chaos of time with respect. The poems can’t be rushed and aren’t easy on first impression. The syntax fucks itself, breaks up, then comes back to show that even grammar is relative.
pins drop over the city
the wind whistles
to no verdict
Take me sleep
protect me, like angel music
You taught me the pleasure
of petty crime
of sneaking away
with a glass full of wine
Ironically, these seemingly cynical poems invite us to dig under the rainbow and see the flesh, the teeth, the hard truth of death; and the result is a beautifully complex twister of problems I want to solve.
Compared to the first book, the poems have become increasingly creepy, and the “murderer” more vivid. The story inches closer to a horror film, that scene when protagonists find out unpleasant secrets, searching in the shade.
“What do I do, knowing that I need impulses to live?” seems to be the question the book poses through narrative play, a juxtaposition of the main persona’s perspective and murderer’s influence.
The news is presented grosso modo, but the pleasure and humor in the work is in the poetry more than the facts and in how Beau Blue’s specific word choices play on how one had perceived the events.
The title is ironic, playing on infinity and the number 8: if cats had nine lives, then we’d have one less, 9-1. The foreverness of loss. Are we lucky or unlucky to fall in love? Passions and thrills, heartaches and grief, walk hand in hand.
The identity in of the author is quite certain and solid, grounded in local pleasures, tastes, weather and emotions. The questions that these poems ask are valuative, a weighing of what matters.
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