It was James Baldwin who said:
You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
The first time I read Brian Gyamfi, his poem, ‘The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi', it instantly became a favorite, & I carried Baldwin’s relatability on my head. Gyamfi’s poem is about love, and silence—a man dulled by ruin, and unwilling to speak of it—a knowledge I shared. As I too once lived with an ache and spoke of it only by the movement of hands—a self-torture. I found kinship with the silence of Kofi, Gyamfi’s subject in the poem, which begins:
When Eloise tells Kofi she wants a divorce,
he sits naked on the kitchen floor skinning
an ox tongue to prepare Eloise’s favorite dish.
Since then, I have given to it the respect Brian’s craft demands.
The afternoon I received Gyamfi’s ‘What God In The Kingdom Of Bastards’, excitement fluttered inside of me like flies to the smell of sweet. Heading back home, I opened it on the bus. I had a great concern for each page, so I took my time to work out each word from Publication Details to Epigraph, like a proofreader.
When I got to the Contents page, I counted the number of poems, and when I ended at thirty-five, I was happy that the book wasn’t so long, happy that its shortness must mean that these were poems Gyamfi believed were the best for a first book of poems. I was happy. So happy that I wrote down the first lines to a personal poem of the day: “Ecstasy walks with me like a jacket.” I told my friend in a text after, that I was happy about this poem I only had a line to; and when I got to the house, I would eat & then place all my focus on the Gyamfi collection.
I did exactly as I said, and unfailingly, these thirty-five poems gave me an entry into the questioning, an intentional interrogation on the holes that make a man, or in this case, as most of the poems spoke of, boyhood.
What appears below is a conversation between me and Brian Gyamfi, edited for length and clarity.
Chris Baah: Hi Brian, I am so excited that I am just going to dive right in. There is a moment a boy becomes a man. We all know this, and oftentimes in our world, when we say that, we mean ‘the boy should lose his softness & embrace the grit in manhood.’ In this loss, one thing we do not realize—or perhaps we do know of but ignore—is that this means the boy goes, the man becomes this being empty of tenderness & its variants that look like love. Across the poems in your collection, ‘What God In The Kingdom Of Bastards’, I keep noticing how your subjects attempt to reach towards that tenderness. For example, in ‘Progeny of Wounds’, our persona says: “Maybe I have not loved as much / as a man should.” Then in ‘Age of Nudes’ : "my love for her, / like a party hat on a birthday boy, reflects in her eyes, / an image of myself I dearly miss.” What I love about these personas is their bold, unapologetic honesty.
I would like to know, did you ever have a moment of such epiphany as a man? What demands you to give the men/boys in your poems that senses what they have had to give up, what they have lost? MaKshya Tolbert in a poem, ‘Failed Eulogy’ writes: “From the beginning no one wants a poem about tender men…” Do you find yourself/your poems suffering from the thought of rejection?
Brian Gyamfi: That phrase “a boy becomes a man” is perhaps one of the most violent idioms we accept without question. It pretends to mark growth but in truth signals erasure. The boy does not so much become a man as he is stripped of certain permissions: permission to cry, to admit fear, to speak love plainly. The transition is less arrival than subtraction and less transformation than confiscation.
I cannot point to a single moment when I “became” a man. Instead, I remember the slow attrition: the teacher who mocked a boy for tears, the men who equated gentleness with weakness, the way friends policed affection. These abrasions accumulate. They press tenderness underground.
So I return to it in my poems. To write tenderness into men is to resist their flattening into stoic archetypes. It is to restore what was always there. My subjects do not discover tenderness so much as reclaim it.
Do I fear rejection? Inevitably. The world is suspicious of tenderness and of empathy. But poetry’s task is not to placate rejection, it is to endure it. If a reader recoils from the tenderness of Lot or Frank, the poem has already revealed something urgent about our culture: that gentleness in masculinity itself is a flaw.
CB: When I read ‘Horseradish’, I found myself in the end returning to the poem with a sense that I had missed something. On going back, I stayed in these lines, “No one said much. No one left the couch” & “I’m retelling this story to Mercy in Chicago as we watch the pigeons bicker.” They are contrasting lines, Brian. They differ but also in a way seem to complete each other—the what should be but isn’t; a ‘something’ withheld, but said in another version. It feels very intentional to me. Tell me, how did you approach intentionality in the storytelling of the poems in ‘What God In The Kingdom Of Bastards’?
BG: Memory is not linear; it is recursive, fractured, and many times unstable. It is not a ledger but a palimpsest. Each telling edits the last. In ‘Horseradish’, silence — “no one left the couch” — and speech — the retelling to Mercy in Chicago — are not contradictions but twin truths. One registers what was withheld and the other what was later released.
What interests me is precisely this tension: how silence lives alongside confession, how a story continues to breathe across geographies, across time. Intentionality, for me, lies not in offering one definitive version but in showing the fractures themselves. The truth of a memory is not contained in its first telling, nor in its second, but in the shifting light between them. That instability is what I want the reader to feel; the sense that memory is less a record than an echo chamber, reverberating differently each time you enter it.
CB: I told you recently how as I read Tawanda Mulalu’s collection, ‘Please Make Me Pretty I Don’t Want to Die’, I thought of your poems. That there is something in the way Mulalu manufactures language in his poems that make them new. Like a synonym for another word or in this case, phrase or line. Which is one of the aspects of your poetry I enjoy. Take for example lines from these poems:
“The doctor opened my mother’s head / finding nothing but a bee’s sting” (‘Fragile Crafts’)
“the boy shouts the river is eating the flower” (‘The Tree Carries Water’)
“Frank smokes himself into a hyena” (‘Beowulf’)
Now, on writing poems, I would like to think that it is the poetic voice or the persona’s voice that influences the language of the poem. Ishion Hutchinson says in an interview with ‘Only Poems’, it is a merge between sense & sound which gives language its strange but fresh feeling. What do you think about language in your poems? I do not know much about music, or opera? From the little I have read of you, I imagine you know a few things about it. Is there something to musicality in the way you approach language in your poetry? Something that becomes speculative perhaps?
BG: I rarely think of a line first as a sentence, I think of it as sound. Language has to do more than carry sense; that alone feels flat, and yes, we shouldn’t mistake confusion for complexity. “Frank smokes himself into a hyena” stays alive not just for its metaphor but for its rhythm.
I think of poems as hymns sung by fractured choirs; some voices harmonizing and others breaking apart. Musicality matters because it teaches the poem how to both live and exceed explanation.
Speculation enters here: sometimes sound leads the way, suggesting what meaning can’t quite articulate. A word can tremble on the page and conjure grief or astonishment without ever naming it. For me, that’s the highest work of poetry: to make the words sing.
CB: There are three poems in this collection that reminds me so much of Chris Abani’s ‘Smoking the Bible’. First, it is ‘Praxis of Being’ where our persona says: “Our uncle said mepa wo kyew, kafra… / which is untrue; our uncle has never apologized.” Second is, ‘The Fall’ where we meet: “Father’s nakedness grows tired of him but how / can I hold space for forgiveness when he wakes?” The last poem, ‘Common Tongue’ closes it: “God, / I want to receive anointment and joy / Despite the movement of a father’s cane.”
In a poem in that Abani collection, ‘Father,’ we meet forgiveness. A son saying: “It is not that I haven’t forgiven you, angel of my Eden. / It is not that the edge of my sword hasn’t dulled. / Forgiveness comes easy, forgetting does not.”
What I have is a short question really. How do you consider forgiveness along the line of love & masculinity?
BG: Forgiveness, in my work, is rarely resolution. It is burden. Fathers wound, sons love, and masculinity intervenes like chains. Masculinity resists vulnerability, and forgiveness requires precisely that.
So forgiveness hovers over the work; partial, incomplete, absent. Love persists, but harm is never erased. Chris Abani writes, “Forgiveness comes easy, forgetting does not.” I would say forgiveness itself rarely comes easy. And forgetting is impossible.
In my poems, forgiveness is not catharsis but complication. It is holding injury and love in the same palm. Masculinity often insists this palm remain closed and unyielding. Poetry lets me pry it open, at least briefly, to show the ache that lingers when love and hurt occupy the same body.
CB: In the poem, ‘New World,’ you make such use of “rain” & “light,” to speak of something greater. & also in ‘The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi,’ I find a similar approach towards the “ox tongue.” Even in ‘Praxis of Being,’ when I read “The octopus and the burnt salmon / are exchanging their water / for kerosene and smoke,” or even the ‘sheep,’ I seem to touch symbolism in it. Your use of it. I have to tell you that most times, there is a joy in symbolism because it gives me a chance to make something more of the poem. To crack it. However, some readers argue that a poem is not some code, & plainness in poetry is the way to go. Now, I am not saying that one is greater than the other. Nothing with that regard. What I am interested in is your thought towards symbolism across the poems in the collection. How did it work for you?
BG: I resist the notion of symbolism as code. I do not write puzzles for readers to solve. Symbolism, for me, is amplification. Rain, ox tongue, octopus—these are not secrets but expansions. They allow a moment to resonate beyond itself, and to gesture outward.
At the same time, I rely on plainness. A plain sentence, spoken without ornament, can pierce more sharply than metaphor. Plainness is incision and symbolism is echo. One cuts and the other reverberates.
A poem that oscillates between the two — clarity and mystery, ground and abyss — is one the reader can live inside. Not solved, but inhabited.
CB: To close this conversation Brian, I will end where we began. I want to go to the most intriguing poem for me in the collection. The poem, ‘Cocaine & Flowers’. I read it when it was first published in ‘Narrative Magazine’. It’s been a few months since I believe, and it still holds the same thing for me. I do not know what to make of it, then other times, I do. In some parts, I find an attempt to interrogate a kind of masculinity, & then I don’t. In some parts, I find an attempt to interrogate Americanness, & then I don’t. The persona in the poem says, “I have a mind for understanding things / that should not be understood.” Will you talk to me about this? Tell me something, anything in particular you have come to understand about being a man—a black man with so much love to give in this world—that should not be understood.
BG: That line comes from exhaustion. As a Black man on this planet, I am often asked either implicitly or explicitly to comprehend the very structures that harm me. To comprehend inhumanity, why cruelty repeats, why brutalization still demands allegiance. But to comprehend this is to risk consenting.
Cruelty should remain incomprehensible. To fully “comprehend” it risks normalizing it. And yet, my mind compulsively circles back. I interrogate, map, and analyze as if comprehension might provide safety.
'Cocaine & Flowers' acknowledges this paradox: the hunger to comprehend and the peril it carries. It admits that the mind’s need for comprehension of harm can itself be another form of violence, one we enact against ourselves. And so the poems remain as witness. That, to me, is the burden of being alive here: to look, to know it costs you, and still to insist on speaking what you see and how you see.
***
Brian Gyamfi
Brian Gyamfi is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Zell Fellowship, and two Hopwood Awards. A finalist for the Oxford Poetry Prize and the Poetry International Prize, his writing has appeared in POETRY, Narrative, Guernica, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry. Gyamfi’s debut poetry collection, What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press, here.
‘What God in the Kingdom of Bastards’
What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is a poetic exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers: Lot, the elder, who is flesh and alive, and Frank, the younger, a ghost navigating his post-suicide existence. Their relationship anchors the collection, weaving themes of love, loss, and the arduous reconciliation between the living and the dead. Combining vivid imagery with fragmented, conversational tones of prayers, laments, and whispered confessions that are surreal and lyrical, Gyamfi delves into the ways trauma—both personal and systemic—permeates family, faith, and identity.
The imaginative force behind Brian Gyamfi’s ‘What God in the Kingdom of Bastards’ is raw and electric, fusing myth, memory, theology, and sensuality with fearless originality. Gyamfi reshapes biblical and diasporic mythologies with irreverent reverence—sacred cosmology meets visceral absurdity. Here, faith becomes dance, disruption, and wound; theory becomes flesh. Grief, masculinity, and mental illness unfold through intimate, bodily metaphors: ‘Jesus at McDonalds,’ boys baptized in creeks, the smell of oranges in a casket. This is a breathtaking debut, a dizzily exhilarating and boundary-breaking poetics—at once grounded in dirt and soaring into the dream depths of mythology.
—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas
Chris Baah
Chris Baah is a Ghanaian-Nigerian writer who creates under the name I Echo. He is the Founding Curator of NENTA Literary Journal, where he also serves as a Poetry Curator. He is studying for an MFA at George Mason University, where he serves as an Editorial Assistant with Poetry Daily and an interviewer and features writer for the Cheuse Center.
August 29, 2025