Starlight & Error

by Remica Bingham-Risher

How do we save what’s coming? The love between two people, cut through by error and time, often marks the path for those who follow. In Starlight & Error, the legacies of love between aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, children and their children’s children is re-told through the lens of imagined memory. In the difficult landscape of the present, is black love revolutionary? Are faith and forgiveness? Here, the history of love—fraught with fear and light, war and hunger, distance and gravity—is always asking: how do we transcend the mistakes of those who made us? Can music save us? Can the stars?

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite poems: "Cleaning House", "How I Knew Michael", and "Ways to Please a Five-year-old Superhero".

[Shauna Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes place is so powerful it serves as a major player. In this collection, “place” is song on a turntable or Walkman, love’s rhythms. Love for family, for reunited lovers, for self, beat by beat.

[Cedric · Rating 4 out of 5]

In S&E, Bingham-Risher's work centers on family (e.g., origin stories, marriage, stepparenting) marriage and faith. One thing that stands out in the book is the extent to which she is comfortable discussing her faith (generally I find poets aren't especially religious folks)-more specifically, I don't think I've ever read a collection by a Jehovah's Witness. So I found myself googling terms like "Kingdom Songs" and finding out that it is the name of the JW hymnal. (And just last week, I heard a song by the [excellent] rapper and Jehovah's Witness Rapsody [NC stand up] that referenced singing "Kingdom Songs" with a lover-so I understood the reference thanks to this collection.)

Perhaps my favorite piece in the collection is "Cleaning House," an amazing piece about an aunt who would seem to most to be all too willing to take back a transgressing husband. Bingham-Risher paints the scene in evocative, graphic detail:

"...Her husband, covetous fool that he is, has taken up with Ms. Karen, a married woman who lives in the cul-de-sac two streets away. Karen has watched my aunt's children, brought her paper to the door, pledged friendship...After she has entered my Uncle fiercely-sliced through his stomach with a kitchen knife-we find my aunt, clutching a sponge and old bucket...scrubbing carpet like she is bringing sandpaper to rough wood. 'There's blood on the floor,' she says, and doesn't rise...'I been to her house,' she says, the Brillo from the sponge cutting into her hands, her blood mixing with his blood, bleach from the bucketwater clearing her knuckles of meat. 'She keeps a nasty house and Lord knows, she says, leaning closer to the faded stain...no woman should live that way."

Another issue Bingham-Risher takes on that I've seldom seen addressed in poetry is the role of being a stepparent. From "Skipping Stones":

...we all have the right to say exactly what we mean

so when the child spits You're not my mom anyway
you are all at once given the gift of enlightenment

remembering your mother's rage as you slammed
the door she paid for, barely that month,

working double shifts and hiding rent
money in her bra or Bible

and the humiliation of your father
after, in front of your giggling girlfriends-

...you threw

the truth at him You're not mom
so you can't tell me what to do

and he smacked you across the face
and then went and cried for a long time in his room...
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Yet another favorite is "Vinyl," which again returns to the subject of marital forgiveness; here, Bingham-Risher employs a line from Bill Withers' "I Want To Spend The Night" as a refrain:

The last time I find myself
lying between the times
we make love, I run my fingers along
my own thigh in hopes that the door
will reopen, miraculous in its forgiveness,
its remarkable swing, its willingness unlike mine

I can't keep looking at loneliness, trying to call it freedom...
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Finally, Bingham-Risher's "On Religion" is striking for its quiet defiance and defense of expressions of faith, as well as for how she avoids stridency along the way:

We wait until we are wed to make love because God knows the body better than us. We've broken our bodies in the past using irons, razors, swing sets, steep steps, lovers, and careless piety. We are responsible for these injuries. We don't want to hurt each other, and this is enough to keep us chaste. Jehovah is first but in the second place there's this contempt we share for those who tell us what we will never do....There are legions we are trying to exorcise and abyss-gods of brutal hunger, gods of our silencing, gods of the closed-fisted, gods of impossibility.
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Bingham-Risher writes poetry you want to sit with a while. I highly recommend S&E for all readers but if you're one who comes to poetry with trepidation because of its inaccessibility, you'll have nothing to fear here. She even includes a generous note section, helping readers with allusions they may not understand as they read through. Not a bad gift idea for this time of year.

[Genevieve]

"It begins like a song we keep trying to sing / then ends in beckoning, like most things / we dream but can't pin down" (p.50).