Book Review: Vantablack by Ciona Rouse

Inspired by the scientific endeavor to create the “most perfect black body”—Vantablack, or the “vertically-aligned nanotube arrays of carbon” used in space and in military equipment—poet Ciona Rouse explores blackness in all its nuances and paradoxes in her debut chapbook. Vantablack (Third Man Books) opens with a poetic list of what to be and what not to be; the list, which includes “Be not a body. / Be not a brain,” and “Be not black. Only.”, challenges the notion of seeing oneself and others by a singular, sometimes-defining-but-most-other-times-not characteristic. Rouse urges readers not to be black only, but to be “orange and green / and brown, which is purple.” Although, as Rouse points out in the “About Vantablack” page, “something covered in Vantablack looks like you could just walk into it and disappear,” Rouse challenges that notion again and again throughout her chapbook, exploring the idea of shades of blackness—and shades of disappearing. In “How a Child Explained the Drive-Bys,” for example, Rouse uses a triptych to show the (often contradicting) ways in which actions are understood and interpreted. In the first stanza, “Barbie” is used to describe the ideal white style of living. In this world, Barbie can pop her head off “whenever she wants,” and there is “never / a shot fired” in the house. Barbie will never be “hitting the carpet in / fear.” The constricted and slim middle stanza, however, is supplicant, in which we are told to “kiss / the / ground” and “crawl.” And the last stanza, almost as a foil, is “like supplication,” where the child of a house under fire “pretends they are / angels”, yet these angels “can’t know / how to save her / from all of the things” such as “Shrapnel: dreams.” Together, the triptych interweaves the illusion and the dream through the slim connecting thread of the reality.

In “There’s so much I want to tell you,” Rouse grapples with what to call a mother who has no child, a mother who has miscarried yet is still a mother in every sense of the word. She is a mother who “survives / somehow in a language that whispers around / her.” There are no “words / for a woman identifying a body, / emptied”, yet we have the word “matriphagy” to describe a spider mother who “regurgitates her own body repeatedly for her children / to be able to eat.” An interrogation of language is present in many of Rouse’s poems, yet she also calls on colors to represent concepts, feelings, words for which we have no words; just as the mother elephant who has recently lost her child is given the new name “Blue in Green,” we as readers are rechristened with the many colors consumed and hidden in the great dark maw of Vantablack. 

Rouse is not afraid to be political in her poetry. “How Some Children Play at Discrimination” recounts a blatant act of racism on the playground, in which Leanne says “only to the dark skin / girls . . . no you don’t get to play here.” In “On the Sidewalk of Troy, TN, 1904,” Rouse encompasses the uncertainty of being a black male on a sidewalk and all of the burdens and assumptions that come with that label: dark, menacing, scary, dangerous. The danger runs both ways, though, as illustrated by the lines “Don’t look / into her eyes / man on the sidewalk,” highlighting that if the man oversteps, his body will be “lined in chalk,” the ditch on the side of the road will be for him. Ultimately, as Rouse declares in “Marrow,” “I am vitally black,” despite the danger, the challenges, the racism. Rouse’s words delight and inspire, emote and encompass the various layers of color in America, and the ways people see and react to those colors, both positively and negatively.

By Abby Lewis



Abby N. Lewis is a poet from Dandridge, Tennessee. She earned her associate degree from Walters State Community College, where she received the faculty award in creative writing, and her BA in English from East Tennessee State University. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection Reticent (Grateful Steps, 2016) and the chapbook This Fluid Journey (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in over a dozen journals and magazines, including Timber, The Mockingbird, and Sanctuary. You can keep up with her on her website.