Jameka Williams holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. he currently resides just a couple hours south of here in Chicago, where she edits for Haymarket Books. Her work has been featured at many prestigious outlets, among them Gigantic Sequins, Muzzle Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly—and the 2020 Best New Poets anthology. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her work appears in the 2019 New Poetry of the Midwest anthology from New American Press. Williams is also the author of American Sex Tape, a compelling statement on pop culture.
American Sex Tape™ starts, so smartly, with a cento—a collage of lines from other poets, mostly American, including Whitman, Clifton, Ginsberg, Lorde, and Hughes. This prelude feels like an American echo chamber, letting the reader know they are—at the very least—part of an audience but probably the performance itself. The poems lure us in with their musicality, then find us trapped within their form. Something that Terrance Hayes, in his American Sonnets, might call “part music box, part meat Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.”
Alongside the great American poets, Williams gathers other creators—most notably, the persona of pop culture symbol Kim Kardashian, sometimes even directly referencing Keeping Up With the Kardashians. These different textures never conflict, really, but instead make for a broader, more challenging, honest American voice. One that exists as both voyeur and opportunist. Witness and vehicle.
Holding this book feels like reading a sext—to the reader, to the speaker. Something that vibrates at the intersection of vulnerability and desire. Confessional but never breakable. The confession: some combination of “I think a lot about empires” and “I intend to outlast.”
As Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss says, “rarely, a book of poems comes along that is biblical in its authority and iconoclastic in its capacity to rearrange or explode the furniture, the nation, and the self. American Sex Tape™ is one of those.”
