It would be dishonest to say that I could engage Brittany’s work with any measure of objectivity—which I don’t believe exists for even the most rigorous critics and theorists. If anything, I believe that it is our biases which bonds us to our readers who hurt where we hurt and love what we love and consequently might be convinced by us on the basis of our passions. This doesn’t mean I will lie to you. It does mean that my analysis of Brittany’s work is irrevocably infused with the intimacy of loving and having been loved by her for more than half my life. That intimacy cannot be separated from how her lyric lands for me; sacred as a juke joint; sacred as an altar call.
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In James H. Cone’s The Cross and the Lyncing Tree, he lays the foundation for what I call, Juke Joint Theology. In the landscape of Black life and the Black Spirit, Cone considers the Juke Joint a place that affirms the humanity—the flesh and sex and grief and wanting of the Black body. It’s not at odds with the Black church’s affirmation of the Black Spirit among a pervasive anti-Black theology and country. At its height, the Juke Joint was where Black folks might arrive Friday and Saturday night for one kind of filling before showing up to church on Sunday morning for another.
I determined that in a world that despises Black women, the Juke Joint and the church weren’t just “not at odds” with each other. They relied intimately on each other’s existence as you cannot affirm the Spirit without affirming the flesh in a world that has made hatred of our bodies critical to its foundation. Juke Joint Theology considers Black art that engages the grief of anti-blackness and systemic violence while simultaneously engaging desire, pleasure, and affirmation of the physical body without shame or the white gaze.
Brittany Rogers’ stunning debut Good Dress knows what it took many of us too long to learn—that uplifting Spirit while condemning flesh does not make for wholeness. And so, Good Dress is a kind of Juke Joint in literary form, critical to holistic spiritual formation. Alongside Brittany’s language, I could grieve and lust, flex and sing, pray and snatch myself back from what or who would deny my humanity.
Brittany opens us in desire with “Money”, a contemporary ekphrastic responding to Cardi B’s music video. “I, too, want” is the collection’s first line and from here I know my wanting is welcome. Desire does not remain uncomplicated in this collection but it is always Brittany’s to own. She continues
“ I, too, want
to walk in the bank
brazen. to rain
dollars over my friends’
asses fund any pleasure
we want”
This opening poem is a thesis for this debut. It centers pleasure and the intimacy of love complicated by class, complicated by the male gaze and gendered violence, by familial lineage and inheritance, by maternity and adornment. This opening poem sprawls its tendrils throughout the book with concision, preparing us for the deftness of Brittany’s craft. Brittany’s volta,
“ it’s not really about the money
who would I have been
had my family kept
the land we owned
before the factory buyout
before we stopped scraping change together”
prepares us for the way matrilineage, class, and the shifting landscape of Detroit layer her meditations on desire, self ownership, and pleasure. Her penultimate lines, immediately give us a shape for even the complications of the title,
“ I don’t want to be rich
I want enough coin
to relax
to spoil
my damn self to tend to the baby
gasping and rooting for milk
without worrying
about ruining
my good dress”
She centers us in this literary Juke Joint imbued with lust and blues. This Juke Joint which is not about forgetting or fantasy but a place where desire exists at the same time as grief and displacement—-exposed and surging through the body.
Part of the Juke Joint’s appeal rests in how it stands in contradiction to a society that demands the restriction and surveillance of our bodies. Brittany opens us with the knowledge that this is not a place for the restriction of desire, sexuality, or adornment. Neither is this a place meant to reduce
the grief of circumstance. Brittany is teaching us how to blues-sing desire. She is teaching us how to reclaim the self amid historical-present, social-intimate violence. There are a limitless number of things attempting to literally or metaphysically kill her: postpartum depression, colorism, sexual violence, poverty, heteronormativity, PTSD, fundamentalist theologies, and more. And consistently, Brittany emerges with self-ownership, writing “Not a damn thing belongs to me but me.”
I entered this book as a witness, but Brittany writes, “If I am one Black girl, I am all of them.” I imagine this collection as a gathering. There is no place for shame. This book is an invitation to build a mantra and mission around what couldn’t kill us but damn sure tried. About what it means to do more than survive. Brittany’s reclamation of the body after violence is clear and assertive as she writes,
“Most girls shy
away. I glutton. I devour.
I do not wait to be made a meal of.
I plucked the first boy from his porch.
Then the next. The next.
And Him too.”
Everything returns to autonomy. She reinforces this, ending the poem with, “Don’t you see? / No one took me / this time.” That is what the Juke Joint was. A place to go and not be taken. A place to choose which pleasure would be yours—even if that pleasure could not be divorced from the context of that which had taken you before.
Juke Joint Theology demands both affirmation of the Spirit and flesh. And still then, Good Dress proves to be my altar call. Which is not to be confused with altar which is, by any measure, an object that we build with sacred intentions. The altar call is a declarative invitation for people to come forward. The altar call names what it senses in its audience: a lack of hope, injury, a desperate need. The altar call says, come forward to get healing, get encouragement, get a word from God. The altar call says, someone here has not been made whole but can be. Brittany’s work says someone in this room doesn’t know how beautiful they are, someone in this room doesn’t know they don’t have to be ashamed for their love and wanting. In her poem, “Bedside Baptist” —which is titled after the moniker given to those who sleep in or worship from their bedrooms on Sunday, away from traditional liturgical gatherings—Brittany writes,
“I’m not fit for the Lord’s
house: crop top
bonnet, boy shorts.
Lust-drunk. Giddy
off my own perfume.”
This is not a condemnation of self—only an acknowledgement of the demands of an institution she was reared in. Shame does not belong to Brittany. It is for those who would experience it by proxy of her choosing herself. Refusing to adopt it, Brittany’s poems acknowledge that much of what we have is second hand, but shame does not have to be. She writes,
“I last wore a slip
when we lived
at the church three nights
a week. Back then,
I shamed my mother
when I wore jeans. Refused
the baptismal pool. Fell
asleep in the back pews,
in the lap of a girl I was
too close to.’
This poem opens on a meditation of the way the song, Total Praise sends Brittany into worship. It’s Fantasia’s cover of the song that makes her chest “grow thick / with water lilies.” The poem closes again with autonomy. Brittany writes,
“At home, I am my own
priest. I offer my shrill
praise. Proud.
Loud. So rowdy,
He runs in
to see about me.”
Proud in her worship, her rowdiness makes “Him” check on her. This work is radically sacred in its affirmation that there is nothing that could separate Brittany from the love of Brittany—or the love of God. This is the truest Gospel—one that turns any mirror or bed into a Sunday morning pew.
Brittany Rogers’ Good Dress, makes it known—the body’s desire and need for pleasure, adornment, and the affirmation of the self is not frivolous. In the penultimate lines of the book she writes,
“Don’t think
me dramatic. People have died
touch-starved, penniless.
I will not settle for anything
less than sunflowers In every room, a vase full
of their ornate faces, bone straight backs.
Everything keeping me alive is the most
beautiful. Every day’s color is yellow.”
When I say that Good Dress is my Juke Joint and Sunday morning, I am saying that while sitting with those poems, no one else’s idea of what I do and don’t deserve mattered. No one can make the world, its failed systems and anti-blackness, its misogynoir, etcetera etcetera disappear. But while reading Good Dress, those violences did not own me. I accepted their reality and chose myself, egged on by Brittany’s lush affirmation.
Embedded in Good Dress is what Brittany has always reminded me of 1. There is no greater hell than being foreign to yourself. 2. Intimate love, platonic or otherwise, saves us. 3. Who gon’ beat your ass about standing in the fullness of yourself and desire? Nobody.
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In Toni Morrison’s essay, “The Source of Self-Regard”, she addresses the fact that her book, Beloved, was once taught at a large university in 23 separate departments ranging from history to legal studies to psychiatry in conjunction with English literature courses. She meditates on how none of her other books were read across so many disciplines. Morrison says, “maybe this book is a kind of substitute and more intimate version of history.”
I name our literary ancestor Toni Morrison’s rumination to say that my review of Good Dress is not comprehensive. It is one lens to a collection that makes so many of our conditions, intimate affairs. And so critics of other perspectives should pick up where I won’t pretend to be qualified. Come those concerned with Black maternity. Those concerned with the intersections of race, gender and class. Come lovers of Detroit and the poetics of place. Come, those interested in the way Black women poets queer form. Come Saints. Come ye scholars of Black kink, gentrification, deconstruction, matrilineage, Black beauty, adornment rituals, gender politics, and migration. Come hip-hop scholars. Climate change activist. Mental health practitioners. I settled in this review where I felt called— as a fickle saint, theologian, and platonic lover. Good Dress is for the self-seekers, pleasure takers, the wayward and questioning, the church girls, mothers, adorners, and eldest daughters. Good Dress would have saved my life if Brittany hadn’t already.