Description
If Amiri Baraka wrote with Paul Beatty’s mic and Yusef Komunyakaa’s telescope, the result might sound like this. Get Funky, Get Swoll cuts and cajoles. These are wonderful poems.
–Terrance Hayes
Get Funky, Get Swoll explores, demonstrates, and indicts the multifaceted and multifarious ways white supremacy, white culture, and, in very specific instances white people, have had a profound and tragic impact on the human experience of those people known as Black.
The collection’s opening examines intimate racism—the kind that exists between friends and friend groups and lovers; the kind which does not holler or thump or come crashing into the heart but does so quietly, stealthily, inflicting grave harm. The book’s latter half comprises a series of love poems to Black people, and specifically to Black women—a Black female muse and the ethereal, transcendental, metaphysical Black Female. These poems serve as a countermeasure to the insidious impact of a society that pushes the simultaneous endeavor of self-hate while offering its own pale flesh as a refuge.
Get Funky, Get Swoll makes complex once again the so-called Black experience, which is to say, the human experience. Akhim Yuseff Cabéy’s collection functions not only as a reminder of the tragic impact of white supremacy on the hearts and minds and souls of Black people, but as a signpost: more danger is headed our way, and we must hold on to the spirit we have left.
