this is the bible I wish I had read as a kid

Mini-review of Precious Okoyomon's poetry book, 'But Did You Die?'

Precious Okoyomon’s ‘But Did You Die?’ is an illuminated manuscript, featuring the artist’s paintings alongside poetry written as if through the sky into text, into type, into unresolved meaning. The tradition is simultaneously sustained and reinvented. These poems are a reflection of the ‘self’ as one, as parts of a whole, a whole which often does not treat you with kindness. These words are the fine proboscis tip of the long line of ancestry that precedes it. Time is illusive, coy and coquettish in Okoyomon’s lyricism. Introspective and irreverent, I was hooked on every word. As a kid of religion myself, I was pulled into Okoyomon’s radicalization of Christianity and compulsive honesty, two things I am equally drawn to and repulsed by (in the way one is repulsed by the scent of stagnation, recognizable but ultimately pungent.) Okoyomon bares their cross through weed-smeared dissociative strolls across Harlem, songs to the sky that evoke poet and politician Aimé Césaire and house internet-speak so cleverly juxtaposed you’d mistake it for inherent wisdom. Through maroon velvet curtains, I mean, covers, god peers down at his familiar Bible-thin sheets and is forced to reconcile the deeds he’s imposed. Here truth cannot be hidden, only absolved.