A Chorus of Contradictions

Adedayo Agarau reviews W. J. Lofton’s collection “boy maybe.”

By Adedayo AgarauApril 3, 2025

• Poetry

• Cultural Studies

IN HER THOUGHT-PROVOKING 2020 book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong explores how racial trauma is often commodified in American culture. Hong critiques the way personal racial suffering is frequently expected to be packaged as spectacle, noting in an interview that “as someone of color, the only time you’re justified to express your indignation is if it's trauma as spectacle where pain is put on a pedestal.” This observation, hovering over much of contemporary poetry, provides a potent lens through which to examine W. J. Lofton’s new collection, boy maybe (Beacon Press, 2025). Billed by its publisher as “a queer artifact/anti-colonial weapon/survival psalm,” Lofton’s debut full-length arrives with formidable claims on our collective conscience: it seeks to channel poetry’s capacity for social intervention, spiritual reflection, and personal testament all at once. But in a climate where the commodification of marginal voices is as much a driver of literary production as genuine ethical urgency is, boy maybe raises pressing questions: How effectively can a poet fuse aesthetic innovation with political activism? Is the poem itself a reliable weapon, or do market forces dull its blade? And, perhaps most importantly, how does one navigate the burdens placed on Black queer poets to be both heralds of political critique and guardians of communal healing?

Drawing on strands of contemporary theory—including the work of Dorothy J. Wang, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Saidiya Hartman, and others—boy maybe is both searing and uneven, occasionally stifled by its own rhetorical weight. At its best, Lofton’s writing crackles with a sense of urgency; at its worst, it teeters into a kind of aestheticized trauma that feels neither wholly radical nor entirely transformative. The resulting collection is a deeply ambivalent document—testament to the complexities of creating political art in our era of heightened visibility and precarious commodification.

From the outset, boy maybe situates itself in a lineage of American protest poetry. Its epigraph, taken from June Jordan—“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth”—announces Lofton’s central concern: the relationship between the lyric voice and activism. For many readers, the question of “truth” in poetry has become entangled with commodification, particularly for poets of color whose experiences have become desirable cultural currency.

In “butcher shop,” a poem near the end of the collection, Lofton writes:

I know how to beg for mercy.
I know the weight of loneliness
And things I touched trying to understand
Love. It hurts to live a life.
It is always asking for more.
Everything feels hollow
Then the blood comes.

A snapshot of pained vulnerability, “butcher shop” dramatizes a moment of embodiment: the speaker is both subject and object, the one who begs and the one who bleeds. The poem’s abrupt pivot from the universal (“It hurts to live a life”) to the somatic (“Everything feels hollow / Then the blood comes”) captures how a poet of color’s aesthetic maneuvers may be read primarily through the political lens. And although these lines hover between the intimate and the incendiary, the question remains: does this poem politicize the private, or does it risk aestheticizing the violence it seeks to critique?

This tension between emotive confession and sociopolitical critique runs like a seam through boy maybe. At certain junctures, we sense Lofton’s frustration with the reductive assumptions placed on Black queer writers to either “perform trauma” or risk irrelevance. At others, the poems walk dangerously close to what could be described as a “marketable trauma script,” whereby the poet’s revelation of personal pain becomes a kind of currency. The poet is hardly alone in this predicament—indeed, as Hong argues, it is a structural bind. In boy maybe, we watch Lofton wrestle with it on the page.

Stylistically, boy maybe hovers between free verse lyric and the aforementioned fragmented approach, which both invents and inverts caesuras, evoking an overall sense of searching restlessness. This experimental sensibility connects Lofton to predecessors such as Tracie Morris (with whom he studied at Cave Canem), Tyehimba Jess, and Evie Shockley—Black poets who have similarly pushed against conventional form to articulate complex experiences. The poem’s halting structure becomes a metaphor for the psychic prices of navigating multiple intersecting identities in a racialized society. Meanwhile, there is an echo of Gwendolyn Brooks’s clipped, incisive lines, though Lofton shifts from the extended metaphor of “butchery” to a more direct rendering of violence near the poem’s end. It’s as if he’s testing the elasticity of the lyric to hold a moment of personal devastation alongside its social implications.

Where Lofton’s formal experiments flourish, they masterfully underscore the precariousness of marginalized embodiment, creating a poetics where form and content achieve perfect symbiosis. Throughout the collection, his approach to fragmentation serves as both aesthetic choice and conceptual framework, reflecting the discontinuities of living at multiple intersections of identity. What emerges in boy maybe is a compelling response to what we might call the “challenge of urgency”—the task of crafting poems that speak to immediate political realities while maintaining artistic integrity. Lofton navigates this terrain with remarkable dexterity, particularly for a collection that so boldly straddles the line between personal revelation and social protest. His formal choices never feel arbitrary but instead emerge organically from the emotional and political necessities of each poem, demonstrating how innovative poetics can amplify rather than diminish urgent messaging.

Among boy maybe’s most striking conceits is its repeated invocation of touch. This theme surfaces in poems like “to know touch better”:

still we were faggots before & after they killed us
we could have punctured the frog’s curse sooner
my nigga’s lush lips could have drawn neck-near
unknotting my durag with his row of neat white teeth

Lofton’s poetry immediately immerses readers in the complex intersection of Black and queer identity through jarring juxtapositions of intimate and violent language. The poem collapses temporal boundaries with lines such as “we were faggots before & after they killed us,” highlighting how the very capacity for pleasure and closeness renders queer Black bodies vulnerable to harm. This tension evokes Alexander Weheliye’s concept of “habeas viscus” and Christina Sharpe’s notion of the “weather” of anti-Blackness, creating a poetics that balances between longing and terror, where the possibility of redemptive touch constantly confronts the historical certainty of violation.

While this ambivalence gives Lofton’s poems their piercing quality, boy maybe raises fascinating questions about the relationship between poetry and rhetoric. How does a poet maintain lyric surprise when working with urgent political material? When Lofton returns to “touch” as threat and solace throughout the collection, is he composing a deliberate leitmotif or testing how repetition itself mirrors traumatic experiences? The collection achieves its most transcendent moments when conceptual insistence and lyric innovation move in perfect synchronicity that creates a delicate balance that few contemporary poets manage to sustain throughout an entire volume. Even in the collection’s more overtly political moments, Lofton demonstrates an awareness that embodiment contains multitudes: a rich terrain where the personal and political are inextricably, and often beautifully, entangled.

Throughout the collection, Lofton imbues his work with spiritual overtones. This investment honors and interrogates inherited traditions where this dual move—of reverence and revision—characterizes his strongest pieces. However, in poems like “would you kill God too?” the reliance on established elegiac forms sometimes limits the revolutionary potential of his poems.

In “lady day visits glynn county,” Lofton demonstrates how he can transcend such limitations. In the poem, he memorializes Ahmaud Arbery, the young Black man who was murdered while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia, in February 2020. The poem begins:

no breeze finds home in georgia
heat rises like a maxwell whistle
breaking the sound barrier
lock the doors when the white men come

Here, the speaker situates us in the sweltering static of a Southern summer, as if the very air colludes with the threat of violence. Invoking Maxwell’s iconic falsetto situates the poem in the realm of R & B’s sonic memory, underscoring how the cultural production of Black artists becomes a backdrop for contemporary tragedies.

On a thematic level, “lady day visits glynn county” ties into José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “queer futurity,” suggesting that the present’s cyclical violence obstructs the possibility of imagining a different tomorrow. The stifling air (“no breeze finds home in georgia”) becomes a metaphor for the claustrophobic inability to move past this repetition of anti-Black aggression. Indeed, in Fred Moten’s sense, we remain trapped in “the hold,” the structural space of captivity that extends from transatlantic slavery to modern policing. By linking Arbery’s murder to a spectral Billie Holiday—through her nickname, Lady Day—Lofton draws a long line across American history, from lynchings to modern extrajudicial killings, weaving in the lament of Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” which remains tragically relevant.

In bridging these temporal moments, the collection questions how we navigate the passage of time: is the poet forced to remain in the past at a site of unresolved trauma, or is there a glimmer of futurity, a break in the endless loop of violence? Often, Lofton seems more comfortable invoking cyclical trauma than pressing toward a radical reimagining of tomorrow. In that respect, boy maybe frequently edges toward despair. Some might read this as a shortcoming, while others might consider it a faithful record of the relentless realities faced by Black communities. Some may find in these poems a necessary confrontation with what cannot be redeemed or even resolved; others may yearn for a more explicit optimism.

In the poem “baby’s breath,” the roadside flora becomes an ominous premonition: “bowing roadside is the first omen / followed by bodies posing into memory / yellow lollipop and puckered lip.” Here Lofton juxtaposes innocent imagery with the spectral “bodies posing into memory,” highlighting how violence becomes aestheticized. This tension evokes Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” which demands that we approach sites of violence with both empathy and critical awareness, resisting the transformation of suffering into mere spectacle. The poem incorporates the speaker’s discomfort into its fabric, acknowledging the ethical dilemma of representing violence.

Set against the backdrop of the American South, boy maybe draws on a rich cultural tapestry, from the Black church tradition to the music of the region’s greatest luminaries. In referencing states like Georgia and Kentucky, Lofton taps into complicated racial histories that continue to inform contemporary political realities. Katherine McKittrick’s notion of “demonic grounds” posits that Black geographic spaces are always contested, shaped by histories of dispossession, plantation economies, and the afterlives of slavery.

Lofton’s poems often seem most compelling when explicitly grappling with these “demonic” layers of Southern space. In “lady day visits glynn county,” the Georgia landscape becomes a crucible of past and present violence. In “would you kill God too?” the Kentucky grass stands as a site of unfulfilled springtime (and, implicitly, rebirth). When the poet stitches these references to physical landscapes with references to biblical imagery and everyday tragedies, the effect is one of layered, inescapable memory. However, Lofton’s approach to place differs intentionally from the systematic historical excavation found in works like Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006). Where Trethewey transforms landscapes into explicit archives of trauma, Lofton employs a more impressionistic technique, offering powerful glimpses that allow readers to feel the South’s presence without cataloging its wounds. These atmospheric evocations of place—the heat rising “like a maxwell whistle” in Georgia, the unreached “bluegrass of kentucky”—create a resonant emotional backdrop that pulses beneath the collection’s surface. Through these carefully curated moments, Lofton reminds us that the haunting legacy of the South remains an essential current flowing through boy maybe, one that informs its poetic vision without dominating its landscape.

Music weaves quietly through the volume, with references to Maxwell, Frank Ocean, Janet Jackson, and the spectral presence of Billie Holiday. Moten’s concept of the “break” as a site of sonic and cultural resistance resonates here: African American music traditions have long provided spaces for collective healing and rebellion. Lofton’s use of these references underscores that the poet’s own lineage is shaped as much by pop and R & B as by biblical cadences.

Throughout the collection, Lofton brilliantly integrates musical references that cause rich cultural resonance. Unlike the more overt structural integration seen in works like Kevin Young’s Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (2011) or Tyehimba Jess’s Olio (2016), Lofton employs a subtler, more personal approach that mirrors how music often exists in our lives—as profoundly fleeting moments. The invocation of Maxwell’s whistle in “lady day visits glynn county,” for instance, captures in a single evocative image what might otherwise require extensive exposition. These carefully chosen musical touchpoints function as emotional shorthand, creating immediate resonance for readers familiar with these artists’ work. Lofton’s deft incorporation of these references invites fascinating questions about how layered, melismatic voices might echo the unspoken in Black queer experience, or how falsetto serves as a powerful metaphor for living at the edges of normative masculinity. These musical allusions, like perfectly placed notes in a composition, enhance the collection’s emotional depth while inviting readers into a shared cultural conversation that extends far beyond the page.

In the end, boy maybe stands triumphant in its observation of contemporary political poetics. Lofton’s voice achieves brilliance where lyrical fervor collides with carnal tenderness, creating moments where “touch to touch” might redeem a violent world—this violent world. The collection, in its unevenness, illuminates the paradox confronting Black queer poets in our cultural moment—one that simultaneously amplifies and fetishizes narratives of marginalized suffering. But overall, boy maybe not only makes visible these contradictions; it also offers some amount of resolution, between the feral optimism of collective survival and the quiet violence of cultural appetite. Lofton’s brave poems collect and deposit metaphors that confront and ultimately transform the spaces between visibility and erasure, reflecting the complex realities of Black queer existence while forging pathways toward imagined freedoms. Through language that is at once raw and meticulously crafted, Lofton’s boy maybe enacts an alchemical resistance—one that refuses to surrender to the simplistic narrative arcs our culture so eagerly consumes.