Publishers Weekly
06/26/2017
Sealey’s elegant and elemental debut acts as a balm for and protectant against the hazards of modernity. Though her poems are very much in and of the material world, Sealey’s gifts of attention and distillation resist any tendency toward superficial excess and distraction. Brief poems leave no room for flourishes, moving instead with lithe musicality toward the universal. She locates the human condition succinctly—“We fit somewhere between god/ and mineral”—and attends to the vast range of experiences contained therein. One of the collection’s longer poems, “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You,’ ” is a gorgeous meditation on human connection; the cento, a form composed solely of quotations, nods to the ways in which expressions of love are at once culturally inherited and unmistakably one’s own. The collection also contains playful riffs on pop culture, including sonnets in voices from the film Paris is Burning and a sestinalike poem featuring the characters from Clue (which is then subsequently recast in a spare, sober erasure). But there are also images of racism and violence—and in one of the book’s many withering-yet-beautiful turns, Sealey wagers, “Every thing aspires to one/ degradation or another. I want/ to make something/ holy, then walk away.” And yet, instead of walking away, Sealey engages with the world patiently and courageously. (Sept.)
Booklist
Sealey’s astute and searing verses revel in the tragedy and wonder of the black experience in the U.S. . . This virtuosic collection belongs beside Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal (2016), and Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories (2017).
Natasha Trethewey
A stunning cento, an erasure, and a defense serve, together, as ars poetica for Nicole Sealey’s remarkable debut collection.
Tracy K. Smith
Ordinary Beast is my favorite kind of book, charged with quiet wisdom and exquisite lyric attention...Nicole Sealey is a poet for the ages and this is a stunning debut.
Patricia Smith
The sorceress Sealey...serves up an impossible cento that punches the daylight from your chest. Nothing ordinary here. But beast? Yeah, that’s it. This thing has teeth.
Claudia Rankine
In this brilliant debut, clarity is ushered through form, strutting its way into life, into our lives.
Library Journal
08/01/2017
In poems whose fluid, wide-open style belies their grit, Sealey explores issues of race, gender, and sexuality within the context of cultural expectation. For instance, "candelabra with heads," shows how African Americans approach every moment weighed with history: "Had I not brought with me my mind/ as it has been made, this thing,/ this brood of mannequins, cocooned and mounted on a wooden scaffold, might be eight infants swaddled and sleeping." Instead, she concludes, "Who can see this and not see lynchings?" (Shouldn't we all?) Elsewhere, she observes, "The West in me wants the mansion/ to last. The African knows it cannot." Sealey is sharp-tongued and refreshing as she steers through human relationships, happy for a friend whose bad love life ended well and painting indelible portraits of a drag queen, a true believer, and the diva dreaming of being a spoiled white girl. She can wax existential ("We are dying quickly/ but behave as good guests should") while also turning in a darkly hilarious reenvisioning of the game Clue. VERDICT Surprisingly, given her numerous honors and the assuredness of her writing, this is a debut collection, but Sealey's stature as Cave Canem's executive director has rightly created anticipation.
