Reviews

‘Shayla Lawz’s speculation, n. is a debut collection that could easily live on the walls of an art museum….While we are grounded in horrifying events like the murder of Sandra Bland, what surprises and inspires is Lawz’s refusal to despair: “I / understand living and dying as fact, but the / body that refuses death is a star.” Despite the heavy scaffolding underpinning the collection, Lawz has promises to keep, and so many of these lines actively resist hopelessness, anchoring us with a recurring “HERE”’

Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation

“Inundated by the news of the state murder of Black people, Lawz wrestles with how to believe in the future as a queer Black woman. An early line in the collection reads, “There is a dream in which I turn off the NEWS, yet it follows me.” There appears to be no escape, and yet the speaker refuses to surrender. “I log off the internet. I say, I am not dead yet.” Using inventive forms—including audio elements that readers are invited to access online—Lawz conveys the devastation of public anti-Black violence and private losses, while also beginning to chart a path forward. The collection as a whole declares, “i am alive, i am alive!” and speculates of a better future.”

Ten Questions for Shayla Lawz, Poets & Writers

ILYA KAMINSKY, AUTHOR OF DEAF REPUBLIC

"sometimes i want to ask the earth, / was it beautiful    here / without us" writes Shayla Lawz in this virtuoso performance. Innovative, inimitable, endlessly urgent, speculation, n. is far more than just a collection of poems. It is a dazzling verbal and visual performance, a concerto, a book of our days that is as heart-wrenching as it is an accurate portrayal of what it means to live and sing in America today. "i've been seeing my body around // in the stairwell, in the house / and even at times in the mirror. in the news" urging us to lift the veil and open our eyes. Some books you read and never forget. This is one of them.

DOUGLAS KEARNEY, AUTHOR OF SHO

“Is this a kind of fortune or curse?” the speaker asks, “To share a disappearance. Some call this magic.” And this speaker is the poem’s speaker, the TV’s speaker, the radio’s. The speaker is her late aunt, the speaker is the breathless news, the speaker promises she won’t be dying but living; the speaker ponders over the difference. Ponders over the distance between bodies and a body, the family errand and family emergency, 12’s backseat and Sandra Bland’s feet suspended over the cell floor. Here is the hard investigation of being here, then being gone, misplaced, somehow lost, or someone’s ghost. Shayla Lawz speaks: “it’s too late to die, i said / it is far too early,” and her extraordinary book, speculation, n., transmits live from the brilliant Black space between-time. I call this magic.

HARMONY HOLIDAY, AUTHOR OF MAAFA

A self immortalized in phantoms is at once gone and everywhere. This work chases that kind of selfless, misplaced, displaced, replaced, implacable self back into the world. I am trying to forgive/ I am learning about flight, that self admits, and the poems here teach us how to do both at once and survive it. They are as much encounters and visitations as they are recountments of an endless, endlessly threatened reunion between sound, song, memory, and the family that weaves itself through