In her fourth book, Imitation of Life, Allison Joseph continues her exploration of African-American girlhood, using personal narrative as the vehicle for revealing the underlying tenor of cultural and domestic identity. Often neatly broken into symmetrical stanzas and roughly four- or five-beat lines, this poetry is accessible and clear, a poetry of witness, in which rhetoric is designed both to draw the audience in ("Remember the market beneath the el, / the wooden stalls that shook each time / a train rumbled overhead?") and to reveal details of the speaker’s self. The result is a fusion of narrator and reader that makes the "I" of Joseph’s poems a contemporary American exemplum.
           Most of the poems in Parts I and II are first-person accounts of childhood experience, from hair-straightening in "Frying Hair" to leaving home for college in "Numbers." Beginning in medias res or with a deceptively familiar image, the poems thrust us into the world the speaker inhabits. It’s a place of lousy toys for girls, "squalling dolls" and "toy kitchen[s]," where even the "snotty-nosed little boy next door" gets to spend entire days "lining up one-inch soldiers" while the girls "pretend to clean and cook like / Mommy." It’s also, however, a place where "The Black Santa," provides the girl with a figure to love, despite his "reeking sweetly of alcohol," who looks like her: "brown eyes, face, skin." And it’s the only Santa she believes in, the only one who matters, especially to a girl who is belittled by a white woman for refusing to jump into the lake at summer camp, "what’s the matter, sweetie, / are you scared." With her patronizing attitude, the director can’t comprehend that the girl is paralyzed by her mother’s warning, "don’t you / / dare come back home / with no nappy head I can’t / comb, stay out of that / damn water, you hear?"
           Part III moves to adulthood and reveals the larger cultural implications of the childhood anecdotes; many of the earlier subjects–music, education, and language–resonate in these "older" poems, as well. Written in the same available diction and syntax, these poems also run the tonal gamut of joyful to despairing. "In the Spirit: On Seeing the Sounds of Blackness Perform, Riverfront Park" begins the section with the line "My body sways in a kind of joy" and it’s an appropriate opening; this poem reveals a woman who "thought [she] was immune to gospel" discovering she "cannot resist." The music is made up of "slave songs, work chants, / passionate psalms of praise"; it’s "the music of a people" that finally makes the speaker "know God." It’s this sort of emotional range and narrative authority that make the final section necessary, the right ending for this collection.
           It’s the right kind of collection, too, for readers of current American poetry. "Political" poetry has made a comeback, as most readers are aware, and the debate in this country seems to have shifted from whether a "true" poetry of protest is possible to what form that poetry might take. Discussions of first-person short narratives, especially those written by women, however, still veer, too often, into easy dismissals of "confessionalism." Must we hear, some commentators ask, yet again about the domestic training of little girls? Must we hear how popular culture generates, then narrowly defines, gender roles and racial difference? Yes and yes. Joseph’s poetry reminds us that the personal is still political and that global issues involving gender, race, and ethnicity have their origins in our individual backgrounds.
             In fact, many of the poems in Part III focus on identity, and in them one person’s experience becomes emblematic of larger concerns, as the best lyrical narratives do. "’Imitation of Life’" brings an old movie back on TV, one in which "a black woman and a white woman / move in together to raise / / their daughters." But one actress is "a white woman playing / at being a black girl / / who looks white." The speaker laughs when the actress "screams / / she wants to be white, white, white / because that’s exactly what she is!" She also laughs through the funeral, "attended / by every black Central casting could find." The movie is "cotton candy," something "too cloying / to ever be good for you." The origin of this depiction of "black and white, mother and daughter" remains mysterious; the speaker is "left wondering whose life this movie / is an imitation of." But there the movie still is, replayed again and again. And there’s Michael Jackson, in "Shake Your Body," the old Michael Jackson–or should I say the young Michael Jackson?–"his face / his own, untouched by surgery." The singer the speaker holds in memory was "on his way to being / a man, a black man" whose dancing was "uncompromised / as the face he used to possess: / broad, brown, African."
            Of course, language makes a poem sing, and Joseph also listens to the sounds that tell us who we are. She has always made deft use of the line break and the ringing conclusion, but in this collection an abiding interest in how language marks us, within families and communities, echoes throughout the three sections. From "Translating My Parents," in which an American child tries to understand her parents’ British diction, to "The World’s Worst Jukebox," which offers up the Crystals "singing / ‘He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss,’" the way language tempts us to be spoken rather than to speak is an overarching theme. It’s no accident that two of the poems near the book’s end are "On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person" and "Incommunicado." In the former, the speaker challenges classmates who tell her she doesn’t "sound / like a Black American," and they respond, it’s "nothing personal." But it is; there’s "nothing / more personal than speech." And nothing more important than "listen[ing] and priz[ing] the inflections" of every speaker. Even the daughter of "Incommunicado," estranged from her father, hears as much as sees him in her imagination, "in the kitchen, stirring / some dish I would never eat." His action is a word: forgiveness. "[I]t starts small," she thinks, "with one meal, one bowl, one satiating, salty mouthful." Spoken at home, sung at church, narrated on TV, words themselves are a central problem in Imitation of Life. They also convey, with difficult beauty, the authority of experience that American poetry may need now more than ever.