A Quiet Rage

Rick Barot’s Chord is a practice of observation. To the Brown queer poet, poetry is the recollection of injustices in solitude, and this is a documentation of the injustices made against Brown bodies. Chord is this quiet translation of rage. The choices Barot makes with enjambments and negative space call attention to these injustices transforming them from detail to image.
In “Wooden Overcoat,” the speaker of the poem distinguishes a detail from an image, where “a barcode on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail, / until you hear that the row of numbers underneath are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm / in a camp in Poland.” An image is “activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.” With these definitions, Barot arms the readers with the tools needed to best read this collection.