and those
who do not know
their history
are bound to repeat it

This blew my mind.
I was at a local bookshop, with a friend, on a blustery day, in December. We both grabbed the book at the same time, and sat there on the floor, flipping page to page, reading it together.
It is Lovely. It is shockingly laid out, at times hard to see, for it overwhelms you. Other times, you feel like you can't seem to get enough, so that you wish to climb into the words themselves.

I started reading, not knowing what was happening. 80 short pages later, I had been enveloped by it. Saul's portrayal of a female god made me realize just how much of a male advantage we have in our typical portrayal of a god. Said A Shotgun To The Head is written and sheds some light for those of us who often find society a bit on the generic side; encompassing labels, masks and unnecessary conformity. The sad part is if Saul made us debut in the year 2017, I doubt he'd be a household name.

Whoa.

This book was short, but there was so much feeling and thought jam-packed into 100 pages it felt like a lifetime.

Very controversial statements and concepts, but so very much to think about, and so interestingly fluid despite the switch in topics from time to time.

The author did a fantastic job of reeling you in (especially myself with a shorter than ever attention span). The way it was formatted really kept me from putting it down, always wanting to know what was on the next page. I think this has become one of my favorite poetry books.

This book amazed and confused me. So much of it was meaningful in small doses, and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I just read. That said, I enjoyed this book so much. It's strange and thought provoking, and I can see myself coming back to this and trying to solve the mystery again and again.

I feel like I did this book a diservice by going into it with too much expectations, because it didn't meet them. Which is sad, because it's a good book with some beautiful poetry, still I was not blown away. I think I'm definitely going to re-read this in the future, just to give it a second chance.

Reading it is completely different than listening to him perform it. I read it first and felt my head crack in half

I'm giving this 3 stars not because I didn't like it, I did, I really liked this poem. I'm not really sure why but there were points where I was on the verge of just bawling my eyes out, maybe that's because of some personal stuff I've been going through or maybe it's because the poem struck a chord with me about something I hadn't thought about in a while, I'm not really sure. I gave this 3 stars purely because I don't generally read this type of poetry and I'm not really sure what to make of it. It was good, it was emotional, it was heartbreaking and funny and brutally honest. I really like honesty. But I don't think I truly understood the author's intentions for this poem, I would need to read it again in order to really understand.

2.5 stars.

Half a star gets given cause I liked it better than She, but I still did not really understand what the topic was until near the end. To me it just seemed like a lot of social politics randomness, but it didn’t really go deep into any of it? Just the fact I was more focused on biting my cuticle while reading, says how much it held my attention. I wish I could love/understand it more.

This is for someone else to enjoy. Not for me.

Vivid and beautifully rhythmic. A strange tale of deities that's easy to get lost in.

Saul Williams, , said the shotgun to the head (Pocket/MTV, 2003)

I have had people comment that they sometimes can't tell the difference between what I consider good poetry and what I don't. To me, it's as simple as can be 99.9% of the time: good poetry deals with the “person, place, or thing” section of the category of nouns. Bad poetry, almost invariable, deals with the “idea” section. T. S. Eliot started out Book 5 of his long poem Paterson with the injunction “No ideas but in things.” It is a retelling of the golden rule of poetry: “show, don't tell.” What most bad poets don't realize is that it is almost impossible to directly show an idea. It is easy to show an idea through things, as long as you're willing to accept the ambiguity inherent in that idea. Many poets are not willing to do so, for fear that either (a) the reader won't get it, or (b) the reader won't interpret it correctly. Either way, folks, bad poets are talking down to you.

I tell you all this at the beginning of this review because I have not recently encountered a book of poetry where both sides of the equation are so well-defined as they are in , said the shotgun to the head, the third book by slam champion Saul Williams. I figured going into this that I was going to be getting a book of bad “poetry”, as usually defined by the slam community, where how you perform the poem and how naked your message is are more important by far than whether you've crafted a good poem or not. A quick flip through before I began reading strengthened this impression, with lots of indentation, font changes, different sizes, black pages... this is exactly the kind of stuff I expect from someone who uses this sort of trickery to disguise the fact that he simply can't write. Then I read the first three sections, and I was blown away. “from now on/cities/will be built/on one side/of the street//so that soothsayers/will have wilderness to wander/and lovers/space enough/to contemplate a kiss” (29-30). Concrete images that convey feelings. That's exactly the type of thing I'm talking about. The language is a bit looser than I usually like, but Williams has the concept of how to write damn good poetry down pat, and he does a fantastic job of realizing it in these first three sections.

The inevitable political sections crop up, despite this being a love poem, and for a while there he manages to keep it up (viz. this gem from p. 56: “where is that voice from nowhere/to remind us/that the holy ground we walk on/purified by native blood/has rooted trees/whose fallen leaves/now color code/a sacred list of demands?”), but as the vast majority of political poets are wont to do, he gets to a point where he no longer seems to trust the reader to get the point unless he spells it out for us in three-foot-high red neon and brands it into our foreheads (given all the fontastic trickery in this book, I'm sure I'd mean that literally if he could have figured out a way to do so), as in: “we are exiting your colosseum/and encircling your box office/demanding our families back/our rituals back/our cultures back/our languages back/and our gods” (68). I'll certainly give praise where prise is due that Williams at least realizes that if you must do this thing, at least you should try to go from concrete to vague, and in that respect it's better than 99% of the political poetry that I've read, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

That said, while the political runs throughout this piece, it's usually enmeshed in the concrete images and language that mark the first section I quoted, and overall the book's good points outweigh its bad pretty strongly. It's that rare example of slam poetry that manages, at times, to bridge the gap between performance poetry and art, and it's worth checking out. ***