Gary Jackson is joining us today to talk about his novel, Small Lives. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Poetry, yes. Superheroes, yes. This is a graphic novel in verse. Gary Jackson’s work is inspired by Afro-futurism.
small lives renders a graphic novel in verse form. Jackson creates his own metropolis, featuring original and remixed superheroes who are othered for more than just their skin and are subsequently and simultaneously celebrated, destroyed, and desired, illustrating what it means to reside in a country’s brutal imagination.
What’s Gary’s favorite bit?
Being raised on comic books, my favorite issues were always the ones where the heroes were in their civilian identities or otherwise inhabiting their everyday lives outside of their costumes. Peter Parker flunking out of college and hustling to pay rent was far more interesting than Spider-Man fighting the villain of the month; the same for when the X-Men would frequent Harry’s Hideaway, a local bar where the patrons never gave Nightcrawler more than a second glance. These scenes revealed so much more about the characters than the big superhero battles that typically populated their adventures—though I loved those big splash pages too.
So, when I had the chance to create my own world of superhumans in small lives, I knew I would include poems that revealed what my speakers did on their time off—and they were very, very fun to write. Poems like “The Invincible Woman Goes to a Party” or “The Invincible Woman Enjoys Her Night Off” present some of the pleasures these speakers engage in when they’re not on the clock. On the surface, those poems might read as pure superhuman hedonism, but I hope they convey more than that. They offer glimpses of the characters’ power sets as well as their own psychological understanding of themselves. The closing lines (really, sentences, since it’s a prose poem) in “The Invincible Woman Goes to a Party” reference a few pills she’s tempted to take because “you’re so close to feeling fucked up that you’d like to press on. But you know you’ll never get there: oblivion’s never been in your cards.” My hope is those lines give some context about the party she’s at, but also reveal her abilities and her reckoning with her own exceptional gifts.
And though I know the point of this is to focus on a favorite moment in the book, I’m going to cheat a little and say that I really enjoyed the overall process of building the speculative world of small lives through these minute actions and scenes. I wanted to play with certain tropes—like discovering that The Invincible Woman can turn her invincibility on and off to a degree, unlike other invulnerable superheroes who always seem untouchable. You witness her struggle to feel in several poems—how she sometimes resents the world for assuming she can’t feel, which signals toward other dehumanizing and racist tropes, such as the belief—even among some medical professionals—that Black people, and Black women in particular, feel less pain.
Other poems do similar work, revealing how myths, stereotypes, and assumptions shape how we view and treat each other. There’s the line “her willingness not to throw it in your face that only one of you is considered human” in the sectioned poem “early retirement,” or “you joke all the violence just sandpapered you smooth” in “The Invincible Woman Has a One-Night Stand.”
In other poems, we see The Willpower Man “sinking each shot without touching the cue ball” in “The Invincible Woman Enjoys Her Night Off,” or The Telepath “send[ing] out a little whisper to your teammate to pick you both up” in “tales to astonish.” In both examples, you catch a glimmer of something extraordinary in the middle of mundanity, conveyed in plain, everyday speech—something I hope makes it easier to settle into this world and suspend disbelief long enough to engage with such characters.
Since I love persona poems, it was natural for me to let the speakers show you pieces of their lives between the margins—or gutters, if I can borrow a comics term. And despite the many personas that populate the collection, there’s never an omniscient point of view tidily summing up the poems. Even the “Dramatis Personae” piece, which lists the cast of characters, avoids laying out too much about their names, appearances, or abilities. I’ve always been a fan of speculative books that avoid explaining the world up front. Better to jump right in and discover this strange yet familiar reality alongside the speakers wading through the muck, same as the rest of us.
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BIO:
Gary Jackson is the Derricotte Chair of the Department of English and the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the author of origin story: poems (UNM Press) and Missing You, Metropolis (winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize), and he is the coeditor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry.