Knight's Skeleton

Reading Etheridge Knight feels like reading a journal, his most personal emotions spelled out in the form of poetry. It’s so charged with emotion that it reads almost as a stream of consciousness, an uncensored version of personal poetry rather than something expected in a poetry anthology. His poem Feeling Fucked Up is relatable in the sense that it feels like something I could see myself writing in a poetry journal, a typical lost love poem that becomes unique under his linguistic choice. Knight’s imagery is stark as the “bright white bone” and “crystal sand” he uses to contrast his lovers “softness and midnight sighs.” Though his poetry reads as pure emotion, it comes charged with literary techniques that convey the emotion with enough power to make the poems memorable in their relatability.   

Knight’s work is laden with imagery, and one of the most memorable images in his work is bone. Similar to Feeling Fucked Up’s “bright white bone”, For Malcom, A Year After describes “dead white and dry bone bare” and The Bones of My Father describes dreaming “of the dry bones of my father.” He also uses copious metaphors in reference to night and day, light and dark, and these—coupled with the bones imagery—create a common repeating image in the book that works like a skeleton to support the remainder of the work.

Knight’s poetry feels like an intimate experience in which he strips away his exterior to reveal normally guarded emotions. The idea of bone, stark white bone, suggests the body has been stripped away to reveal the inner skeleton. It is the ultimate form of revealing oneself, to reveal one’s very bones. Similarly his imagery of light and dark, “the night” and the “magic sun” create juxtaposing revelation and concealment. Thus Knight alludes to the universal struggle between revealing oneself fully and hiding within the prison cells and social structures that have become the norm—not to mention hiding one’s true self within the container of the body.