Oni’s collection captures some of what makes her a “hurricane”

This is a difficult review for me. The nature of spoken-word poems defies the regular norms of what is inaccurately labelled “European” poetry. Spoken-word poems are performance-based iterations of thought that depend as much on force of personality and spoken rhythm as on the hinges of metaphor, imagery and idea. If you imagine a “traditional” poet as a well sinking into the earth to dredge up the secrets of a single theme, then a slam poet is a wide and shallow sea – a joyous intellect skipping over wide waves.

Oni the Haitian Sensation is a hurricane in person, firing vital poetry like shells from deep within her throat. Her love of the form is palpable, her feeling profound. And this is precisely what she echoes in her new collection of poems, Ghettostocracy.

Much of spoken word’s strength rests with its personality; instead of accenting poetic skill, the performance sometimes replaces it and that doesn’t always translate well to paper. That’s not to say that Oni’s poems aren’t strong – for the most part they are – but occasionally Ghettostocracy does suffer from this problem. For example: “Poetry is the tool that set me free./ It you feel me, count to three./ No apology: my history.” I am having serious trouble finding a reason in the poem for “It you feel me, count to three” (presumably a typo of “If”). I rather suspect that it exists merely to preserve the rhyme scheme. But instead it snapped me out of the flow of ideas she was putting forth.

That said, Ghettostocracy is a colourful wash of political, social and emotional commentary that compasses urban life. Her fiery poetry is directed at as wide an audience as she can scope, and in a profoundly entertaining manner. It grows out of certain roots: the urban experience of a black woman in Canada, and, more broadly, the social and political commentaries on race and gender issues that mark our modern discourse. Some lines are memorably magnificent: “Yesterday, a Blackman/ Pulled a trigger -/ It was his phallus -/ And he shot me like a ni@@er,/ The bullet holes in my womb were deep./ In nine months,/ The resurrection had hands and feet.” Rooted in a particular life, these poems remain accessible to absolutely anyone with a breadth of imagination, and joy. Simple joy.

Be proud of your girl, Ottawa.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Dec. 14, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=11047