By J.A. Holm
Sylvia Jones’s debut poetry collection Television Fathers (Meekling Press, 2024) ripples with newness and originality. As though flipping through channels and moving with an energetic sense of urgency, some poems contain only a few rapid, jarring lines. Jones makes use of a variety of generative strategies, including pop-culture ekphrasis, which seems fitting.
Readers will, for instance, find Don Draper from Mad Men, a reappearing character. In one poem, he stands in his clogs attempting to convince the speaker that the water in which they are standing is actually shallow (20). In another poem, set in a mosh pit at a house show, we encounter Andrew Jackson with a tattoo of Lil Wayne on his neck (4). And, in what seems like a fever dream, Susan Sontag and Phil Levine are in a bathroom “together in perfect unison reciting Auden” (7). In every case, Jones’s free-jazz cadence pulses, carrying readers from page to page, even as her witticisms and social critiques rain down. In “Good Propaganda Involves Real People,” she writes:
I don’t know
what nepotism is or means if gerrymandering
is like beauty.
(29)
Topics like demographics and displacement resonate powerfully in this election year. Yet Jones recognizes that in some ways the past repeats and is always present. The prose poem “Turning the Head of a Rake on its Side,” points to the words “Little is new–-written small, on a mirror in Philadelphia next to the hole in the wall in the shape of my running body” (7).
In the second section of Television Fathers’s “Drywall Highway” Jones offers a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by Spike Lee’s film, Bamboozled. The effect is powerful, as images from David Leventhal’s photographic series Blackface—depicting mass-produced household objects infused with African-American stereotypes—appear beside her words on facing pages:
Everything we have
and have been
given
is
manufactured
and bad.
(45)
The manifold work the word “manufactured” is doing in the poem shines, as it relates to the figurine itself—a Black man shining a pair of shoes—or to the racial divide manufactured (constructed) by government, history, and culture. Manufacturing (in the form of genetic engineering) crops up again when Jones dives into this heady claim:
that self—
actualization, actual or not
in all actuality
is just a seedless
a watermelon
(39)
Seedless watermelons have been selectively bred to remove their capability to reproduce in favor of their being easier and more pleasant to eat.
Throughout the book we come face to face with injustices committed against the futures we are complicit in, such as in the five-line poem “If You Put a Robot:”
If you put a robot
on the street
you’re taking
away
somebody’s income.
(52)
Readers are repeatedly urged to interrogate the implications of our choices: the human lives impacted. Jones’s work is rife with her desire for social justice, informed by her views as a prison abolitionist and teacher of incarcerated people. In the final poem of the collection, “Cape Cod,” Jones offers us an antidote to the technological onslaught we weather day-to-day, turning toward nature as a way of rejecting our disconnectedness:
I thought I heard an animal
moving in the darkness but
the animal is me.
In nature there is no ego,
only insects.
(57)
Sylvia Jones’s new collection will leave its readers pondering the values and dangers of the human ego, and the futures we invite when we fail to question our assumptions.
