It's rare that I come across a writer so abstracted that I can make little of what I am reading. Mackey has largely succeeded here, though, and I admit that my rating is part of my quandary of what to think about his largely-acclaimed poetry.

I admit, too, that a lot of stream-of-consciousness work, at its most raw, defies identification as open, conscious art or literature. Uniquely personal, heedless of coherence, a true stream of consciousness is unapologetic about its opacity. Fortunately for us, Mackey is not so dead to readership. Instead, we have what appears to be an incantation, a reverie, an invocation, of ancient gods and spirits--not all African, by the way--as they revisedly incarnate themselves today, sometimes through the work of musicians, sometimes in moments of solitude and despair.  

Even so, while I can make my way fairly well through Joyce, or perhaps more appropriate here, the poetry of Fred Moten, Nathaniel Mackey's pages invite readers mostly to be carried along for the ride, regardless of comprehension. In some ways, the concept of "comprehension" itself is what is being challenged.

In one of the center sections, however, he offered me, at least, a bit of a liferaft, a letter written to one of his editors or commenters, in which we offers some hints about what he is up to, though even this, set in the book as itself a section of a larger poem, does not articulate the whole. 

Mackey does have a coherence of themes or motifs, and it is clear he is in some ways conscious of maintaining their integrity even while calling upon his spirits--philosophies of gratuity, of worthiness, of appeal, all subtly wend their ways. 

For some time in the reading, I was convinced that part of my problem was a basic unfamiliarity with enough African lore and tradition to give this poetry proper credence. And I still believe this is somewhat the case. But Mackey clearly is not so firmly rooted in black history for this to explain it, completely. 

And I am unfortunately left to puzzle over what remains as I might at a modern art show or an obscure wine tasting, surrounded by those who at least make the noises of acclaim, whether or not they can enter Mackey's verse.