Chrome Valley by Mahogany Browne
Reviewed by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
“Today
i am a Black woman in a body of coal
i am combustible and no one cares knows my name
I am a nameless fury.”
From “ Kerosene Litany”
We all hold a multiverse at the crossroads of our identities. Some gain access to privilege while reckoning with their gender; others grapple with their sexuality while embracing their ethnicity. Each of us in this world are looking for a way to find ourselves whole in a society that would rather fragment us into stereotypes and vague but impeding expectations. But poets often find a way to subvert this. Capturing moments in the still life of words and placing them on a table next to each other for the reader to make the connections–for us to see our own unfolding galaxy more clearly. This is what Mahogany Browne does in her newest collection, Chrome Valley.
For Browne, the seasoned veteran of the stage and page, her eleventh book, Chrome Valley, shines a light on the intimate fragments of Black American womanhood and the dangerous world that surrounds it. Browne, who has written choreopoems, young adult novels, novels in verse, as well as served as the Lincoln Center’s inaugural Poet-in-Residence, has always sought to write the world more justly in her work. Community and representation sit at the center of her books and work as the Executive Director of JustMedia, “an open access lens based archive designed to support advocacy efforts for systemic reform through the art of storytelling.” It is this approach to storytelling as means for social commentary and interrogation of privilege and power that leads the reader to embrace the seering nostalgia and heart-stirring intimacy that the speaker of Browne’s newest collection feels traversing the streets of Oakland, California and Brooklyn, New York respectfully, while holding adolescence in the palm of her hand.
Browne’s first pages establish the complex relationship between American history and generational trauma–both of which have their own dangerous and repetitive cycles. Browne begins in “Homer, Louisiana:"
When you are a Black writer in America:
It gets harder to ignore the bodies
Writing in the aftermath of the rising visibility of Black bodies falling at the hands of police officers, Browne asserts that the burden of being a Black writer is to serve as a documentarian of the bodies. It is of no coincidence that the poem’s title anchors the reader to a tragic incident in 2010–the killing of Bernard Monroe Sr., an elderly Black man who was gunned down on his front porch by officers. While this collection stops short of naming Oscar Grant, who was gunned down by police in Oakland in 2009, or Amadou Diallo, who was shot nineteen times by police on his front doorstep in 1999, the looming impact of history, which most recently learned the names of Brianna Taylor & George Floyd, continues to resound in Browne’s locales. However, while Black folks of all kinds struggle with the unwieldy task of being “Black and beautiful and breathing” in an America that is constantly “repeating itself” and “rewriting itself”, Browne chooses to focus on how the threat of violence and the ability to adapt to it are branded in the DNA of Black women.
Centering around Redbone, an avatar of Browne’s mother, readers see how living in a world of stray bullets can make one less prone to flinching. Love becomes Redbone’s form of resistance, escape, and undoing. Readers first meet Redbone dancing with her lover, Bam at the beginning of this collection. This saccharine splinter of time shows how life, untouched by the outside world can seem flawless. The speaker watches on as her parents kiss while dancing to the “Pendegrass croon”.
“If your skin can’t fathom the fever
Of something as necessary as this
Then you can never know the hurricane
Of two bodies how the bodies
Can create the prospect of a sunrise
How that sunrise got a name
It sound like; a blues song;
A woman’s heart breaking"
For Browne, this joy succumbs to the inevitable breaking at the hands of love. Redbone seems both deceived and enamored by Bam’s charm, until it becomes detrimental cycle that repeats itself as she endeavors to recount her own adolescent need for affection and belonging in the arms of a man. Both model how easy it is to cling to any certainty when the world is so uncertain.
While this collection has no formal breaks or chapters, the work moves through an arch of experience and knowing. The violence, offered to and against the speaker holds the most surprise in Browne’s collection, appearing in place of communal connection, drawing and redrawing the boundaries of expectation. From Redbone’s baby “thrashing her limbs until the blood spilled clean” upon her arrival to playing dominoes with “a mean side eye” to being jumped into a gang where “ they crack/baby skull/openwide/ on the side-walk / call it jump in”the speaker reminds us that “a Black child needs to know how / destructive a leap can be.” In two poems named “Best Time III” and “Best Time VI which appear near the center of the collection, where readers may expect moments of naivety and nostalgia to ring like outdoor play, Browne instead offers an account to the silence held around a predator in a small group of girls who have learned their assailant has died and another that paints freedom as climbing “on bus 62” to “ head to the closest mall for a good seat at the girl fight.” And while an outsider would be saddened by this representation of community, those familiar with growing up in the urban sprawl see this as something very different. This is survival. This ability to find joy in the small wins. This front seat to watch someone demonstrate how they could fend for themselves when their back is against a wall. This badge of honor feels more like home than something to be pitied. Browne’s unveiling of this cultural tapestry honors a story and an existence that rarely gets more than judgment. It is flawed, and perfect, and smile-worthy, and heartbreaking. All feelings that Browne masterfully curates during the reader’s ride through Chrome Valley.
But more than just great content, Browne doesn’t shy away from dabbling into form, proving that she is no amateur to the craft of poetry. From use of the pantoum in her poem “Jaundice” to palindrome in the poem “ Before, a palindrome,” Browne bends form to reveal the complexity of learning and unlearning her family. “Before: a palindrome” is an intimate and skillful look at her grandfather. This form that anchors on a single line, which reverse orders all of the previous lines in the poem, serves as the perfect vehicle for use of repetition and gaining new perspective. Readers learn that he served time in prison for “assault with a deadly weapon.” In the first half of the poem, one could read him as careless and cold.
He sat on the hood of a city car and dreamed of
country dew
He was the first-born dust cloud
To a pair of Louisiana pit stops
His parents stole themselves one night
Tucked him tightly in the womb.
Initially, a wanderer who introduces the speaker to his new wife before asking for a ride to his mistress’ house, the speaker’s grandfather appears problematic without reason. But in the turn of the form, Browne sets the reader up to meet him again with fresh eyes, now no longer as the purveyor of mischief, but as the casualty of the world around him.
Before His parents stole themselves one night
Tucked him tightly in the womb
He was the first-born dust cloud
To a pair of Louisiana pit stops
He sat on the hood of a city car and dreamed of
Country dew
He watched his momma and daddy fight
A flurry of wolves
Though the same words remain, Browne softens her grandfather for the reader. It offers a point of connection with a man who shared the same eyes as our speaker- who shaped her in ways she hadn’t imagined. This switch of lenses offers that, what one may have seen so clearly, may not be as clear at all: It is a lesson that resonates across the collection again and again, repeating like history itself.
Chrome Valley is a vessel for the Black American women’s story, both complicated and joyous. It captures the nostalgia of young love and the pain of young heartbreak in the same breath. It reminds the readers that love, and the manner in which we do it, is hereditary. This is a blessing and a curse. But while living in Black skin in a country that seeks to relieve you of your life is a burden like no other, Browne reminds us that “This breath is worthwhile.” A necessary evocation for all those attempting to survive today.
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, librettist, educator, activist, performer, and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Houston, Texas. Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World, Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination and was named a finalist for the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award and an honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. A German translation, under the title "Berichtenswert," was released in Summer 2021 by Elif Verlag. Her most recent choreopoem, PLUMSHUGA: The rise of Lauren Anderson, debuted at Stages Houston Oct 13 and was recently mentioned in the New York Times Fall preview. And a forthcoming opera, She Who Dared, composed by Jasmine Barnes will be workshopped by the American Lyric theater in May 2023. Her memoir, Black Chameleon (Henry Holt & Co, 2023), explores the use of modern mythology as a path to social commentary.