Yabo by Alexis De Veaux

Alexis De Veaux laces together the past and the present with poetic elegance in an intricate and delicate pattern of call and response. ...Echoing the work of Jean Toomer and Toni Morrison, Yabo speaks in a powerful and insistent cadence about things we may have forgotten: death, desire, magic and the drum beat of resilience. ~ Jewelle Gomez, author, The Gilda Stories
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In lean, unjustified lines, this skillful scholar of blackness gives us her latest rebel text, Yabo. Novel or epic poem? ...Whether Alexis De Veaux is writing fiction, poetry, theater, biography or letters, she does so with a mythic grasp of her subject matter: language, rhythm, history, pussy, gender prisms and prisons, circular time and time travel, naming and simultaneity of locations. Sex is stated, understated; and the intellectual hunger won’t be separated from the erotic. Subtext is everything. See Yabo ... like a Mingus composition: Pentecostal, blues inflected, full of wit and that deep literacy of the black diaspora. The present, the past, the uncertain future collapse upon themselves in this narrative of place/s. Our dead move with us: behind us, above us, confronting us—in Manhattan; Asheville, N.C.; Buffalo, N.Y.; Jamaica; the hold of a funky slave ship; crossing and bending lines between genders, sexualities, longing and geographies. Time is a river endlessly coursing, shallow in many places, deep for long miles, and, finally, deadly as the hurricane that engulfs and destroys the slave vessel, “Henrietta Marie.” Yabo calls our ghosts back and holds us accountable for memory. —Cheryl Clarke, author, Living as a Lesbian and The Days of Good Looks