Worldly Things

by Michael Kleber-Diggs

Overview

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry

“Sometimes,” Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.”

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.

But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.”

Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

Additional Recognition: 

A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection

A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021"

A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021"

A Reader's Digest "14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now" Selection

A Books Are Magic "Recommended Reading" Selection
An Indie Gift Guide 2021 Indie Next Selection

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317636
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	06/08/2021
Series:	Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	766,377
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Michael Kleber-Diggs was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly and a few anthologies. Michael teaches poetry and creative nonfiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.

Read an Excerpt

America Is Loving Me to Death

America is loving me to death, loving me to death slowly, and I
Mainly try not to be disappeared here, knowing she won’t pledge
Even tolerance in return. Dear God I can’t offer allegiance.
Right now, 400 years ago, far into the future–it’s difficult to
Ignore or forgive how despised I am and have been in the
Centuries I’ve been here–despised in the design of the flag
And in the fealty it demands (lest I be made an example of).
In America there’s one winning story – no adaptations. The
Story imagines a noble, grand progress where we’re all united.
Like truths are as self-evident as the Declaration states.
Or like they would be if not for detractors like me, the ranks of
Vagabonds existing to point out what’s rotten in America,
Insisting her gains come at a cost, reminding her who pays, and
Negating wild notions of exceptionalism – adding ugly facts to
God’s favorite-nation mythology. Look, victors get spoils; I know the
Memories of the vanquished fade away. I hear the enduring republic,
Erect and proud, asking through ravenous teeth, Who do you riot for?
Tamir? Sandra? Medgar? George? Breonna? Elijah? Philando? Eric? Which
One? Like it can’t be all of them. Like it can’t be the entirety of it:
Destroyed brown bodies, dismantled homes, so demolition stands
Even as my fidelity falls, as it must. She erases my reason too, allows one
Answer to her only loyalty test: Yes or no, Michael, do you love this nation?
Then hates me for saying I can’t, for not burying myself under
Her fables where we’re one, indivisible, free, just, under God.
Coniferous Fathers

Let’s fashion gentle fathers, expressive—holding us
how we wanted to be held before we could ask.

Singing off-key lullabies, written for us—songs
every evening, like possibilities. Fathers who say,

This is how you hold a baby, but never mention
a football. Say nothing in that moment, just bring

us to their chests naturally, without shyness.
Let’s grow fathers from pine, not oak, coniferous

fathers raising us in their shade, fathers soft enough
to bend—fathers who love us like their fathers

couldn’t. Fathers who can talk about menstruation
while playing a game of pepper in the front yard.

No, take baseball out. Let’s discover a new sort—
fathers as varied and vast as the Superior Forest.

Let’s kill off sternness and play down wisdom;
give us fathers of laughter and fathers who cry,

fathers who say Check this out, or I’m scared, or I’m sorry,
or I don’t know. Give us fathers strong enough

to admit they want to be near us; they’ve always
wanted to be near us. Give us fathers desperate

for something different, not Johnny Appleseed,
not even Atticus Finch. No more rolling stones.

No more La-Z-Boy dads reading newspapers in
some other room. Let’s create folklore side-by-side

in a garden singing psalms about abiding—just that,
abiding: being steadfast, present, evergreen, and

ethereal—let’s make the old needles soft enough
for us to rest on, dream on, next to them.

Table of Contents

One
End of Class
Source of My Confidence
The American Variety
I Love My Neighbors as I Love Myself
After you left
Superman and My Brother, Spiderman and Me
After they left
A Simple Question
Seismic Activities
Sustenance
Adaptation
Ode to My Mother’s Face
In Convenience
Gloria Mundi

Two
Coniferous Fathers
Gestation Fantasy
Arterial
Confluence
Lost in the Crowd
Innocence as Collateral
Back in Huntington
My Ultimate Thought Is This
What Name for This?
Man Dies After Coma
Grinding Down to Prayer
Fixtures
America Is Loving Me to Death

Three
Ars Poetica
Postcard from the Bottom of a Lake
Worldly Things
Here All Alone
Access
Postcard to Sean
Prestidigitation
Adoration
Embouchure
Structural Fatigue
Dispatch from Middle America
Dormancy
The Grove
Every Mourning

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Worldly Things

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry

A New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Poetry” Selection

A Library Journal “Poetry Title to Watch 2021”

A Chicago Review of Books “Poetry Collection to Read in 2021”

A Reader’s Digest “14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now” Selection

A Books Are Magic “Recommended Reading” Selection

An Indie Gift Guide 2021 Indie Next Selection

“The full-throated poems in this debut collection see the world whole, allowing daily intimacies against a backdrop of social injustice.” —New York Times Book Review

 

“In his debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, Kleber-Diggs takes his lived experience as a Black man in America, and with his pen, unpacks it . . . There are poems in the collection about Kleber-Diggs’ father’s death; his wife’s miscarriage; about race and racism. Because these are the sorts of subjects he feels compelled to discuss . . . in ways that are candid, open-minded and openhearted. Through these hard conversations, he feels our most profound connections are made.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

“You should read [Worldly Things]. Because the work is so good and original, modest and quiet and piercing . . . More than anything, you should read this book because if a neighbor spends decades trying to find the right thing to say to you, you should listen.” —Mpls.St.Paul Magazine

 

“A remarkable book . . . Kleber-Diggs attempts to ‘hew hope from a mountain of despair,’ offering the world this plea: ‘Let me bloom . . . let me be lovely.’ A truly moving, and very midwestern, collection.”—Books Are Magic, “Recommended Reading”

 

“Though Michael Kleber-Diggs’ Worldly Things . . . is his debut poetry collection, his prowess as an essayist and literary critic isn’t new. His prose is especially honest, engaging and descriptive, and this collection is sure to offer similar meaning and pleasure, with the sound, voice and impact that only poetry can deliver.”—Chicago Review of Books, “Twelve Poetry Collections to Read in 2021”

 

“A stunning, expertly crafted work exploring themes such as grief, trauma, and fatherhood . . . This work is highly recommended for all collections.”—Library Journal, Starred Review

 

“Loss laps at the edges of Worldly Things . . . The book as a whole, though, even as it decries the life cut short, relishes our being mortal, our having the chance to ‘bloom and recede.’ Which is, in the end, what I suspect these poems want for all of us . . . that somehow we will all find our way into becoming ‘lovely yet / temporal.’” —Plume

 

“Michael Kleber-Diggs's Worldly Things shows how he is sustained by family and nature in poems giving shape to the Black middle-class experience amid continuing political tumult.”—Library Journal

 

“Worldly Things embraces the wondrousness of everyday existence . . . Poems of joy and celebration co-exist with elegies . . . [Kleber-Diggs] underscores that writing is itself an act of survival, a means of getting along in a universe that mixes joy with grief.”—Poetry Foundation’s “Harriet Books” blog

 

“This debut poetry collection shines with moments of unexpected brilliance in scenes of domesticity, rural life, and African American experiences . . . Kleber-Diggs revels in evocative simplicity . . . A stunning new poetic voice similar to John Murillo and Tommye Blount.” —Booklist

 

“[An] astonishing debut . . . a collection of perfectly crafted and expertly paced lyrics, each as arresting as the last.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

“Michael Kleber-Diggs wants us to know that an unrealized desire is not necessarily a thwarted or vanished or destroyed one . . . But as for communal peace and common purpose, we will have to persist in imagining these states of being. In Worldly Things, he gives us ‘just enough rainfall’ to nourish, and give attention to, our twisted roots.”—On the Seawall

 

“To follow Kleber-Diggs is to witness the modern condition—to notice it, interrogate it, appreciate it. His worldly things might be ephemeral, yet they’re anything but small. As these confident, unflinching poems accumulate, so too does a genuinely nuanced worldview: disappointed but never cynical, hurt yet forever hopeful.”—Joseph Holt, Great River Review

 

“I am captivated, consoled, and bowled over by these poems, which are knifelike in their concision and oracular at their core. Worldly Things is so full of an age-old knowing I'm shocked it is Kleber-Diggs's debut. It is like the conundrum of the human soul: new and eternal at once.”—Tracy K. Smith

 

"When Michael Kleber-Diggs writes "my vision is common. / I dream about ordinary things—stuff that could actually happen," he seems to write directly into the heart of this collection. And that is exactly what is so extraordinary about these poems. Plain spoken and insisting on the direct gaze, Worldly Things unveils the world that's right in front of us. The world that has been waiting, all this time, for someone to really see what is actually happening.”—Camille T. Dungy

 

“Michael Kleber-Diggs’s Worldly Things gives us beautifully clear-eyed yet warmhearted poems, lamentations, and ruminations that reflect the difficult truths of the nation we’ve been living. These poems of fathers, sons, husbands, wives, daughters, mothers, and strangers show us how we could create community if we take the time and make the effort to treat each other with dignity and care. In the poem ‘Worldly Things,’ Kleber-Diggs writes of his intent to ‘craft / images and devices / meant to survive’ him. He’s succeeded in not only that but also in writing poems for our survival. I’m grateful for this book I didn’t know I was waiting for.”—Sean Hill

 

 

“Michael Kleber-Diggs’s poems quietly put pressure on us to live up to our nation’s ideals. He gives voice to the experiences and aspirations of middle-class Black America, and though the promised land is far away, he finds grace in the natural world, long marriage, and fathering. These supple, socially responsible poems seem to me a triumphant, paradoxical, luminous response to a violent time in our history.”—Henri Cole

 

“Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Michael Kleber-Diggs’s Worldly Things is my standout poetry collection of 2021. Striking the right balance of small, precious moments (teaching his daughter to drive, learning to bake) and abject sorrow (the murder of his father, the death of Black lives at the hands of police), Kleber-Diggs explores life from all sides with refreshing frankness—see ‘America is Loving Me to Death’—while reminding us of the joys of the world and how there is always the possibility of something good. Keep an eye out for ‘Gloria Mundi,’ maybe the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve read this year.” —Nora, Staff Pick, Three Lives & Company

 

“These poems are heavy with a deep and powerful ache, both the pain of loss and the longing for other futures, other ways of being. Michael Kleber-Diggs’s skilled hand writes down the feelings of an open heart and the musing of the clear-minded—meditations on fatherhood and family, on America’s cruelty and racism, on death and on life. I earmarked many pages to return to and pass along to others, particularly the poems ‘Coniferous Fathers’ and ‘Gloria Mundi.’” —Anna Siftar, Oblong Books

 

"From now on, if someone asks me why I'm never moving away from Saint Paul, Minnesota I'm just going to hand them a copy of Worldly Things. Michael captures the nuances of our black and brown community here with unfiltered authenticity." —Riley Jay Davis, Next Chapter Booksellers

 

“This is a beautiful tribute to the reality of blackness in America. Moving, full of loss and love.” —Todd Miller, Arcadia Books

From the Publisher

★ 07/23/2021

Kleber-Diggs's debut collection, winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, is a stunning, expertly crafted work exploring themes such as grief, trauma, and fatherhood. In "Superman and My Brother, Spiderman and Me," readers learn that the author lost his father to gun violence at a young age: "I don't want you to think our Dad had it coming. I want / you to focus on something else—our parents' designs / were undone anyway; there is no sanctuary in the theater." This loss reemerges throughout the collection, both in personal moments and in poignant reflections on the deaths of George Floyd and Freddie Gray. Meditations on the effects of paternal love are also revisited throughout the collection; "Let's grow fathers from pine, not oak, coniferous / fathers raising us in their shade, fathers soft enough / to bend—fathers who love us like their fathers / couldn't," one piece suggests. Kleber-Diggs also finds moments of joyful memory and writes studies of everyday life: making oatmeal, an ode to his mother's face, teaching his daughter to drive, a meditation on marriage. In each piece, it's clear that Kleber-Diggs is pushing readers to both reflect on and explore their impacts on society and vice versa. VERDICT This work is highly recommended for all collections.—Sarah Michaelis, Sun Prairie P.L., WI

Library Journal