Jamaal May Biography
Jamaal May was born and raised in Detroit. His first book, Hum (2013), won a Beatrice Hawley Award and an American Library Association Notable Book Award and was an NAACP Image Award nominee. Hum explores machines, technology, obsolescence, and community; in an interview, May stated of his first book, “Ultimately, I’m trying to say something about dichotomy, the uneasy spaces between disparate emotions, and by extension, the uneasy spaces between human connection.” May’s poems have appeared widely in journals such as Poetry, New England Review, The Believer, and Best American Poetry 2014. His second collection is The Big Book of Exit Strategies (2016).
May’s honors and awards include a Spirit of Detroit Award, an Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Bread Loaf,The Frost Place, the Lannan Foundation, and the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He is the 2014–2016 Kenyon Review Fellow at Kenyon College and a recipient of the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy.
May has taught poetry in Detroit public schools and worked as a freelance sound engineer. He has taught in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and codirects, with Tarfia Faizullah, the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series.
Spout of a leaf,
listen out for the screams
of your relentless audience:
the applause of a waterfall
in the distance,
...
In the beginning
there was the war.
The war said let there be war
and there was war.
...
The heart trembles like a herd of horses.
—Jontae McCrory, age 11
Hold a pomegranate in your palm,
imagine ways to split it, think of the breaking
...
have this, and this isn't a mouth
full of the names of odd flowers
I've grown in secret.
I know none of these by name
...
You will often be held,
unable to hold back,
and it will be necessary
to get used to the downward swing,
anticipate the strike and love it,
if for no other reason than to love
the upward swing and sturdy
rhythm that accompanies the two.
Be hickory or ash, straight-grained
and strong enough to survive overstrikes—
one miss could snap your neck.
May sandpaper be the rough
hand that rubs you smooth.
Be carved until the end of you is a wedge—
you already intuit the precision it takes
to fit well enough to not be dislodged.
Be a length of carbon-rich steel,
2,350 degrees Fahrenheit in the open flame
before you are positioned between
two dies, let the pressure have
all of you until you are formed.
Have the flash cut from you;
excess is excessive. Be cooled in water,
not air. Don't breathe. Drown
...
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