'Blacks were still rare/ on our street, while whites/ filled the neighborhood like dead/ leaves in pool water.' (from Stuart) I'm left thinking about the nature of the lines whether my reaction is negative, positive, visceral or analytical.lines that make me think about poetry and blood and race and life: It is not necessarily the language and the weaving of comic book characters that prompted me to give Missing You, Metropolis 4 stars it's the lines that stick with me the day after I'd read them. It's an interesting concept and I'm glad to see Jackson's effort realized in a complete book. This book makes for great discussion whether one likes it (as in has an affinity for comic books, etc) or does not. This is a truly complete work and stunning debut. There are plenty of less pop-culturally infused moments where he reflects on race, his Topeka past, long-gone love, and his powerfully remembered suicidal friend…among many other things. While Jackson mastefully puts their influence to use throughout the book. It'd be a pretty unfair reduction to say that this volume is ALL about comics. It doesn't matter if can tell Namor from Aquaman…or if you just don't care, as long as your willing to follow Jackson's lead you'll be rewarded by this book. You will read a witness' account of Superman's funeral and think 'Damn…', you'll see Nightcrawler's attempt to pick up a woman in a bar and say 'That dude is slick…and he definitely has a point.' Seamless & authentic integration of comic lore into these poems would ultimately be rather meaningless if it was done in a way that shut out readers who weren't comic fans or who didn't grow up on the genre.

In his hands they truly have that weight. Never once does it seem as if Jackson is forcing these masked and fantastic characters to have some artistic/real-world weight that they don't possess. It works more than you could possibly imagine because these comics, these heroes, they BELONG here. Whether it's Lois Lane reflecting on her love for a near-immortal alien, Tony Stark radically redefining his alcoholism, or a racial deconstruction of the X-Men's Storm, Jackson's debut volume is steeped in the mythology, grandiosity, and essential humanness of superheroes and their stories. Spiderman, Ironman, The Watchmen, Professor X, and of course Supes & the Caped crusader are all either referenced or utilized as astonishingly effective narrators for poems throughout the book. If the title and cover art don't bring it home for you, you'll quickly realize that this collection is built around a deep and lifelong passion for comic books. Jackson's character from Unbreakable) had grown up to be a poet instead of a mass-murdering comic art dealer, he'd have produced a book as good as this.

Missing you metropolis poems