Leaving Cle: poems of nomadic dispersal

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. LEAVING CLE is made from the detritus of reverse migration. Its poems move from Cleveland to New York City to Tuscaloosa's "schoolhouse door" and back again. They travel and party with a musical Cleveland from Art Tatum's 1920's to Albert Ayler and from Ohio Funk to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. They collage a shifting sense of home and negotiate the gift horse of flashbulb memory. Remembering is a character. Houses speak."LEAVING CLE is a beautiful document of eccentric return. A collection of unforecast surprise, it keeps giving home away, disbursing and dispersing hard, pleasurable weather like a new kind of lake effect. Cleveland is Brooklyn is Chicago and elsewhere, everywhere in a set of absolute specificities, upSouth, back east, out and out. There's a black cosmology of "difference without separation" of which Denise Ferreira da Silva, sociologist, speaks. Janice A. Lowe, poet, sings it so hard, makes her air such an