More eclectic mixtape than book, this richly imagined collection of poems is glittering and bold. when the signals come home (Switchback Books, 2021) by Jordan E. Franklin reverberates with the restless, dynamic energy of Brooklyn, a prismatic world through which love and identity are first realized. Franklin gives us a memorable soundtrack infused with complex songs of familial love, a transformation of Black girlhood into womanhood, the eroding effects of racism and gentrification, the pain of illness and grief, and the abundance of song. when the signals come home is a thundering debut that will make you feel painfully alive.

The “album” is divided into four sections, each featuring its very own soundtrack. With songs by Prince, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and Fleetwood Mac, Franklin’s taste in music is as brilliant as her poetry. Her language is piercing and full of strong, bombastic beats that pull you in and won’t let go. The first poem, “Inheritance,” opens with lines so steady and rhythmic they become lyrical: “To raconteur tongue, / solar flare temper, / Mom’s cheekbones, / Pop’s weak eyes, / to knuckle-busted hands, / arachnid fingers, / Bible names, / terracotta curves, / to plantations taken, / vows broken, / a potential future.” One of the many triumphs of this collection is Franklin’s capacity to evoke fierce emotion from her precise, rhapsodic verse.

These poems stretch across time and space, from the speaker’s childhood in Brooklyn spent in the botanical gardens and their brownstone full of family recipes and good music, to getting her MFA in Southampton, to sterile hospital rooms and nursing homes. Franklin charts these movements with music, as particular songs become entwined with certain geographies and memories. Here, hands, spines, and mouths are entangled into an intimate awareness of the body—bodies that are gentle and cruel, strong and withering, dancing and singing. Music constructs the very sinews of this phenomenal collection, holding all of its fluid elements together.

A long family history is unearthed within these poems, as passed down stories are told from a multitude of voices. The polyvocal verse contained here rumbles with the dissonant notes of violence, despair, and love. The stories that Franklin tells are thorny, cacophonous things, but they are always compelling, always necessary: “I promised to stop / telling these tales / but they gather like thorns / in my throat. When my mouth opens, they cut its roof / as I sing.” In this collection, music and stories are the speaker’s inheritance. “Maybe I’m just like my Father,” croons Prince in the background of these poems, and at the heart of when the signals come home is the speaker’s complicated relationship with her sick father. She inhabits the difficult role of her father’s caregiver, which is undercut by their strained dynamic. They need each other in ways that are elusive, resemble each other in ways that are painful, and communicate in ways that resemble a wail. Together, “they harmonize a heavy fatigue.”

Franklin channels Emily Dickinson in her poem, “When I Wake up to More Grief”: “Hope is the thing with feathers that I clip / and leave in a jar— / I don’t bother to kill it— / I want it nowhere near me—.” Like Dickinson, Franklin’s poetry is suffused with the spectral presences of death, grief, and hope. In a poem titled “how to read my poems/,” the speaker tells us: “don’t say spider/ / say someone sews / in the trees…instead of grief/ / say someone rebuilt / your heart wrong.” These poems traverse a fragmented emotional landscape, unravelling into a new language to express ourselves with.

when the signals come home feels like a love letter to Brooklyn, even as it decries the encroaching forces of gentrification. Franklin gives her dynamic city a voice, a song, capturing its grandiosity and fierce character: “The bridge, green-lit / and dressed to the nines / in stars, straddles / the horizon.” Like a Bowie song, these poems are teeming with vibrant, starlit worlds. There is a tenuous balance within these poems between absence and presence. For example, the speaker tells her experiences of the stultifying, alienating effects of racism in white spaces: “A bar in Southampton / I didn’t question how / the only Black things / for miles were me, / the sky and the patches / on the dartboard.”                                                                

This weighty collection is not without its notes of sweet clarity. In “The Nikola Tesla of Compulsion,” Franklin weaves a repeating refrain about raspberries, reminding us of Prince’s raspberry beret and honeyed things on our tongue. She hides her own painful feelings behind the fruit’s delicate sweetness: “Some days, you eat raspberries to keep the / taste of these words off your tongue.” In this collection, Franklin’s mellifluous and mournful poetics is an exceptional feat.

when the signals come home plays with form and the white space of the page, most notably in the striking poem, “Black Girl’s Rondo.” Franklin echoes earlier lines, repeats themes, and bridges images like a song that won’t quite leave your mind. This collection crescendos into something so beautiful and moving that it can only be captured in the evocative language of music. In a bittersweet ending, the speaker finds a way to reach acceptance, though it is conditional and incomplete: “You are not the one / to let him go.” With a musician’s ear and a poet’s voice, Franklin has created a collection of poems you will want to sing aloud.

when the signals come home is available at Switchback Books

Abigail Renner is a junior at George Washington University studying English and American Studies. She is currently a writing consultant in her university writing center, where she loves unearthing writers’ voices and reading across a myriad of genres. She dreams of living on a farm, filling her shelves with romance novels, and laughing with friends over cups of peppermint tea.

The books that live on my bookshelf are somewhat transitory––I only keep a select few, often lending out or giving away titles that I want others to read. However, Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men series has remained in my childhood bedroom since I was first introduced to them as a preteen. These three books––The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith (the series is actually longer than this, but these are the ones I own)––have never failed to help me through especially difficult patches of mental health issues. Part-comedy, part-fantasy, and surprisingly feminist, these tales of a young woman growing into witchcraft (which, she learns, is really just about helping others) have always been stories I could turn to that I knew would serve as a light to lead me through the foggy, dark bog that depression can turn into. 

But these are the books that stay. I figured for my portion of Project Bookshelf, I would highlight some of the most recent books I read, which currently have a home on my bookshelf, but may not for long. Public libraries are such incredible things, aren’t they? 

A handful of recent books on my bookshelf:

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race by Jesmyn Ward

Written as a response to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this book is a collection of essays and poems written by various Black writers in response to the overt and systemic racism pulsing through our country. I’m currently halfway through this book and struck by the timeliness of this, as such voices will always be timely. 

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat was my first writing professor during my undergrad at the University of Iowa, and so it was an incredible treat to be able to read her first novel, published by Catapult in 2020. What’s so compelling about this inherently queer story is that it refuses to be about just one thing––You Exist Too Much grapples with racism, homophobia, love, addiction, and, as the title suggests, taking up space. 

On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss

Published in 2014, this nonfiction book explores the history and science of vaccinations, set against the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, and the birth of Eula Biss’s son. Reading her lyrically written treatise on the protection of others during the tenth month of the COVID-19 pandemic was eerie. Although I found this book compelling and beautifully woven, I was disappointed that disability was not discussed more throughout, as this perspective goes hand in hand with Biss’s discussions of interdependence, illness, and the body as metaphor. 

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Circuses and the carnivalesque enchant me, perhaps in part because of disability’s tenuous relationship with them, and the history surrounding “freaks” and freak shows. While there are many lovely circus-centric novels out there, none (that I have read, anyway) capture the magical paradoxes of the carnivalesque like this one. Like every Angela Carter story, Nights at the Circus hovers between the grotesque and marvelous at all times. 

Next on my list: Untamed by Glennon Doyle, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, and Brief Encounters by Dinah Lenney and Judith Kitchen. 

Hannah Soyer is a queer disabled writer born and living in the Midwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmopolitan, About Place Journal, Evocations Review, The Rumpus, Entropy, Mikrokosmos Journal, Brain Mill Press, Disability Visibility Project, Rooted in Rights, Sinister Wisdom, and Peach Mag. She is the founder of This Body is Worthy, a project aimed at celebrating bodies outside of mainstream societal ideals, and Words of Reclamation, a space for disabled writers.