A fine poet from Georgia

 I know little about the poets of Georgia. But Nicholas Goodly considers Atlanta home, and he’s good.

I admire his poem “R&B Facts.” It’s hard to say what a “fact” is in this poem. It’s best to just consider a sample:

 

One in three black girls learn

to swim by being chased away from

the shallow end of a brown community pool

 

The “facts” range from one to three lines. Some will make you smile, and others are heartbreaking.

 

The ghosts of black slaves are waiting

in one big front room with good music

till their whole families are free

 

The “facts” are not always verifiable. But they’ll make you wonder what is true — and what should be.

• Sources: Nicholas Goodly, “R&B Facts” is in This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024, pp. 175-8.

For a sample online, see “Crossing the Bridge,” published in the September 2023 edition of Poetry magazine and available at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/160860/crossing-the-bridge