Sarah Beddow | Review of <i>The Porch (As Sanctuary)</i> by Jae Nichelle

A Folio of Chapbook Micro-Reviews
October 28, 2020
Edited by Stephanie Kaylor

Sarah Beddow

Review of The Porch (As Sanctuary) by Jae Nichelle

The Porch (As Sanctuary) by Jae Nichelle YesYes Books, 2020 My yearly calendar is marked by rereads. Specifically, I reread the books that I teach in my twelfth-grade English classes. Due to the coronavirus, I'm taking a year of leave from teaching — which also means taking a year of leave from Their Eyes Were Watching God, among others. The moment I began reading The Porch (As Sanctuary) (), by Jae Nichelle, I knew that in another world, where the government worked well and I was still teaching, my students would be reading it, too, come spring of this school year. In the very first poem, "What We Talked From the Porch," Nichelle begins: "I have a recurring nightmare/It begins/like a scene from Their Eyes Were Watching God." For anyone who hasn't read Zora Neale Hurston's novel, that porch is a nightmare. The protagonist Janey refers to the inhabitants of the porch as "Mouth Almighty," people who sit "in judgment,” talking so much smack and gossip that it becomes "mass cruelty. A mood come alive." And in the poem, that is just what the Black women on the porch do as the speaker’s “secrets trail behind me/like loose string.” But this is just one aspect of the porch in The Porch (As Sanctuary). It is also a place of connection, among family but also strangers, and ritual. In Nichelle’s hands, though the porch is a place of exclusion at the hands of “Mouth Almighty,” it is also a place of “communion better/than a sliver of bread on an empty stomach” where it’s warm because “them storms been weathered already.” I can only hope this coming year treats us so well, so I can be back in the classroom with a dozen AP Literature students and a dozen copies of this chapbook. Visit Jae Nichelle's Website Visit YesYes Books' Website

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