Have I Told You About My Superpowers?
By Luther Kissam V
Kissam is an emerging poet and voice from Charlotte, North Carolina, who draws on the celestial, the terrestrial, and sometimes the mundane to explore mental health. These elements push and pull his deeply personal poems through chaos and calm, meditations and medications, and ultimately, to balance. His poems reveal the tumult and tranquility teetering in us all, especially in those whose experience of beauty, joy, and pain is physical, sometimes tragic, and often supernatural.
“I hurtle down a mountain / chasing my tranquil imagination,” writes Luther Kissam in his brilliant, restless, and abundant debut collection, Have I Told You About My Superpowers?. Echoing the personalism of Frank O’Hara, these poems are both urbane and interior, ironic and sincere. Like Anne Sexton, this poet has worked for emotional stability through psychiatry, meditation, and many other modes of self-care. He can claim with hard-won certainty that “life is a rational choice because this song / playing is worth listening to again, / damnit, and again and again.” With candor, affection, in pain and in cheer, these poems articulate awareness of what a good life really is. These are poems in which an honest-to-goodness superhero sings, rescuing us in our distress.”
—Christopher Davis, Author of A History of the Only War and Professor of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina at Charlotte
