CooXooEii Black’s The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky, 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, is a poetics of family, of Indigeneity, and of Afro-Indigenousness. Sometimes it’s a mourning song, and sometimes it’s more a wink and a nudge, and always, it is both beautiful and powerful.
We know immediately, from the title of the first poem of the collection, that Black will write about family. After all, that first poem is “My Uncle Asked” to be in one of his nephew’s poems, to appear as he is. And the bits and pieces he chooses to share with us tell us a hell of a lot about him, even if we only know him as “My Uncle.” He’s a tough guy, and he’s a strong guy: “under all this fat is strength,” he tells us, and we believe it—maybe most of all because of what comes next: “i only ride bareback. let your readers know. / i don’t like how the straps wear a horse’s fur.” He’s a big guy, and he’s got a big heart, and now we meet him through his nephew’s verse.
The titular poem, “The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky,” is another vision of family. It is, fundamentally, a coming-of-age in poetry, as the “you” of the poem—Black himself, I assume—drives his uncle up into the mountains for the first time on a hunt, rather than the other way around. It, like so many of the poems in this collection, is profoundly rooted to Indigenous life, past, present, and, thanks to its ending, future. The boy-become-man has learned from his uncle that there are ways to survive a land that is “ruthless to the clueless”:
he said be prepared to see anything. / so from that moment forward you fixed your eyes / onto the barely warming sky, your family, / your people, younger siblings, / your reservation, and every figure / that has become a father, and you wait / for the coming miracles.
The Morning is another entry in this year’s tour of spirituality and faith. While there are strong echoes of Christian faith here, from the uncles’ faith in God to Black’s evident spirituality, there is also a profound faith in the family and the community, the importance of coming together and of being together. It shines through in nearly every poem, for our narrator is almost never alone. The coming-together is itself a scared thing, as in “East End,” when he describes “black roller skaters celebrating disco love” and then “i joined them round and round moved it to the music like i’ve done at powwows.”
There is a magic deeper than bone in the togetherness, in the presence of the loving community, and Black carries it to the fore throughout The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky.
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