Tilghman A. Goldsborough, Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, )

 

2B honest [4 once] i’m still kinda fucked up
from when The Ground moved ..

, it’s hard 2 deal directly && forcefully w/ pressing issues
when there’s so much going on w/o+w/in
&& i don’t kno
where 2 begin .
like , idk if i ever told u
that My Greatest Fear is falling
from a great height..
i don’t think it’s (re:) hitting
The Ground tho; it’s maybe more
fear of the Panic! ,, of the absolute lack
of control as a foregone conclusion rushes
up 2 meet U,,

I’m absolutely floored by the cluster, clash and careening of Brooklyn poet Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s second full-length collection, following The Western (1080 Press, 2023), his Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024). Across what might first seem a jumble of punctuation, shortened words and clipped text, Goldsborough offers myriad delights through an inventive and engaged lyric working at a whole other level of visual and sound effect, one that at turns sits as propulsive and precise, but ever highly purposeful, thoughtful and deliberate. Reading through this collection, I’m curious as to how such poems might sound aloud: performative and gestural, I’d suspect. “The Yung Man is a Modern Person using modern technology {whose / most valuable possession is a wrinkled piece of parchment paper inscribed / with latin text}_trying to Stay-Ahead of this Nothing he sees thru solace in / activities in The Present: getting in academic fights during master classes / at the nearby university_watching hours & hours of Home & Garden / Television, during which he described a 45 second Lowe’s Baumarkt / commercial as ‘…a capitalist assault that just won’t end…’_texting while / driving a 1996 Mercedes E-class sedan along winding county roads w/ the / windows open, blasting CDs he bought back in high school.”

Goldsborough writes the body, the black body, the black body in America, orbiting a series of concentric circles that land each and purposefully upon that radiating self, held without easy recourse in a particular social and political space. “It’s 11.11 & idk what i want.” he writes, to open the propulsive two-part “testimonial of a depressed & disillusioned student / who seeks salvation—or an easy answer—in the / ‘historically black’ nature of an UBCU & doesn’t find / what he thought would be There.,” “& times i speak in this classroom of strangers / abt ‘pure, destructive consumerism,’ ‘white supremacist capitalist / patriarchy’ n other salient / issues. / otherwise i suffer in silence & the comfort of a persistent lowkey buzz / staring blankly & the consteallations on the tiles in the ceiling / or @ the blinds imported from Venice / or  @ the unwritten possibilities on the blank board / or @ the wood pulp taking the form of a table posing as a desk. / i am feeling detached from ‘my community’: this room fully of hyphenated / american youth: [.]” He writes to find and articulate his cultural and political space, his own agency, across a sequence of frays and histories and conflicts. Or, as the poem “domestic iii” begins: “,society frays @ the seam /where / the legs are sewn together . / it was not built 2 last .”

Set in seven poem-sections—“JACQUELINE TOMATENCREMESUPPE ASCHENBECHER,” “C ON ST EL L A TI O N,” “V BROKE IN BERLIN VOL. I,” “TRAUMZEIT,” “EIGHTEEN,,,NINETEEN,” “CDMX TALES” and “NINETEEN,,,TWENNY (2)”—the poems assembled offer a combination of clipped and gestural language, shortened words and syntax and punctuation spread out into constellations. Goldsborough’s Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) is the true promise of lyric possibility made flesh.