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Laced with magic and mystery, Amber McBride’s Thick with Trouble houses poems like “Black Witch Moth” and “Empress with a Magic Trick,” which challenge traditional notions of female existence and race. The speaker summons ancestors and spirits to analyze life, death, cultural and racial oppression, and America’s inherent acceptance of violence against Black people. In “Black Witch Moth,” the speaker defiantly declares, “Honey, the moon has never been white.” Anchoring it is a stanza celebrating fortitude in the face of the expected:
Its hopeless swagger— a skip to the inevitable. It is better to jump than be pushed off the plank.
However, the final stanza bears an eerie tone:
More moth saying: I’ll kill myself before I let you touch me. I am a master of rebirth. More light saying: We got them, we slaughtered them.
The poem’s final line quietly celebrates violence and the words “We got them, we slaughtered them” echo with a goading, bragging tone. Reinforcing that tone are the italics, which also create distance in the lines.
The same defiant spirit appears in “Empress with a Magic Trick.” Throughout the poem, variations of the female experience occur, but all the variations happen under a male gaze. The most striking stanza appears in the three lines which center the poem:
the harvest forgot to bloom all the fathers lived; every mother died all the babies grew fat.
The line “all the fathers lived; every mother died” carries significant socio-political weight when considered in the context of America’s longstanding history of keeping women silenced, controlled, and their rights curtailed. However, as the poem concludes, the speaker celebrates a powerful agency, one in which a female “gurgles a flood / right out of her crimson mouth” and “everyone drowns & she struts out.”
Poems like “Trespass” openly address a frightening epidemic in American law enforcement and society — violence against Blacks. In 2021, Black people accounted for 27% of those fatally shot and killed by police. Anger is described as starting “as a tickle. / Like a mosquito / that kisses, then itches, then scars.” The speaker asserts, “I like a scar it stays closed,” but alludes to the fact that violence against Blacks is a “wound” that is “widened / to stitch in a note: / bullet shot officer innocent / Black & / too imposing.” Creating even more emotional power, and emphasizing the generational trauma created by the unending violence, is the speaker’s observation that “The flesh won’t knit / back together / with forgiveness.” This particular poem sets the poetic stage for others, such as “The House That Drips,” which appears later in the collection.
“The House That Drips” addresses both gun violence and violence against Blacks in America. However, it takes a deeper look into America’s denial of its own brutal history which inhibits it from making progress toward reconciling with its past. The speaker initially invokes images of gun-related murder:
Blood but not because of haunts, because a man was shot, on the second floor & the blood soaked into the softness of the wood.
Whiteness is associated with evil when the speaker notes, “We Hoodoo knew it was Satan, / white with fury, / but we nodded anyway.” The speaker references Hoodoo—a set of spiritual practices, beliefs, and traditions created by enslaved African Americans in the southern United States. This reference stablishes the narrative which follows, especially when the speaker recounts a litany of people and practices imperative to the narrative:
They brought a priest, who brought a virgin, who called a Conjurer, who only came because the bones were Black— they were just bones but she knew. She told her ancestors & the fire dimmed & ashed out.
The structure of these particular lines create a sense of swirling confusion and desperation, one that amplifies in the penultimate stanza:
They called the house America. Deemed it unlivable— paid a Conjurer to sink it into the ground.
Nonetheless, it is the final stanza, which evokes America’s refusal to reckon with its greatest shame:
Built a new house on top, sturdy walls & roof, but when it rains— still deluge. Still blood.
These lines address the enduring impacts of America’s largest open wound.
America as a perpetually divided because of its inequitable legal and social systems is essentially the theme of “Exquisite Corpse (America’s House).” In this poem, the speaker openly acknowledges America’s willingness to live and thrive in ignorance. They boldly command, “Honey, you must eat to taste.” The speaker also incorporates George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe” to convey America’s “litany of the brutality of forgetfulness:”
The rules have been botched, how can I hide when you don’t even count? I can't breathe, I can’t keep warm in hoodies, I can’t stand on sidewalks, I can’t breathe I can't, I can't breathe under this weight.
Floyd’s words repeat throughout the poem, segueing to the speaker’s direct address of America whose “dark circles” under the eyes “ are carrying the weight / of funeral drums” which echos poems like Ginsberg’s “America” and shape into an overt criticism of America’s failure to right its wrongs: “Eat from the plate / you so carefully assembled” and “Taste the ash, the blood, that strange scrape / of teeth on teeth, that hint of molten metal.” Thus, the speaker develops a dynamic agency, one that decries American institutions which threaten to limit, or eradicate it, completely.
In Amber McBride’s Thick with Trouble, America’s scarred past emerges to the forefront in provocative language. An understanding of traditional American thought and belief is challenged by a speaker rooted in Hoodoo and tarot cards, racial oppression, and bold feminism. McBride provides readers with a fresh take on America’s violence-laden past and present and a chorus of unapologetic women who summon their ancestors, their self-determination, and their histories to create empowerment and existence on their own terms.
POETRY Thick with Trouble
Amber McBride
Penguin Books
Published February 13, 2024
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