The Ambient Violence, Erotics and Race of Ronaldo Wilson

I wrote a response to Ronald Wilson's two great books over on Montevidayo:

The two books are full of assaulted bodies, maybe even “lynched” bodies. They are also akin to the body of Fredrick Douglas’s aunt screaming as she’s getting punished in what Moten terms the “primal scene” of Blackness, the reminder of the constant threat of violence against the black body. But the important part about Wilson’s poetry is that it constantly displaces, deforms this violence as by some kind of Freudian dream logic.