EDITOR’S NOTE: This South Sides Spotlight is a continuation of our first issue, which covered Uche Mba. In part 2, enjoy the poems and an interview question that was left out of the first part!
- Many of our fellow south high classmates tend to find poetry boring or hard to understand. What poem would you recommend to help people get into poetry?
I would remind them that the music they listen to is poetry. Music is a universal language – raw storytelling from artists’ highest and lowest moments.
With that in mind, I’d recommend my poem Ketosis, written before moving from Missouri to Massachusetts. It contains allusions to: Ernest Hemingway(‘s Death) and The Old Man and the Sea, Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart, Frank Ocean and Pink Matter. The poem explores the collapse of the life I once knew while finding beauty in fleeting moments. It uses repetition, simple diction, and rhythm to make deeper ideas accessible. I took one of my lowest moments and turned it into something that can resonate like a song.
