Thursday February 22nd Poets, teachers, students, artists, and family gathered in the exhibition hall at the Halsey Institute to hear Charleston’s first poet laureate, Marcus Amaker, read from his new collection, Empath.

Amaker opened the night with a meditation on the art that surrounded the crowd in the exhibition hall: artwork from Roberto Diago, a Cuban artist whose pieces dwell on the topic of racism through an abstract lens. Like Diago, Amaker focuses on the subject of racism. The two poetry and paintings existed happily in the shared space that night.

Amaker then introduced three high school students that were a part of their school’s poetry club at Burke High School. Each came up to the microphone to share resilient stories of racial injustices and trials they experience every day. The students were greeted by massive applause and a standing ovation when they finished.

In Empath, Amaker writes the south in a beautiful yet tragic way. He takes the beauty of Charleston’s trees, century old streets, and dingy bars and places them up against the grimy, the ugly, and the unignorable race relations that creep silently through the city.

He opened his set with his poem, “Empath (Bones)” about what the Angel Oak tree would say if it could talk. Here’s a particularly haunting section:

 She’d tell you
About the relentless
Weight of bones
On branches.

 Empath is broken up into six sections: “Habit Creature”, “Earthly Ghosts”, “Holy City”, “Thumb Prints”, “Plug In”, and “Write On”. Some poems have accompanying pictures while others were simply hand-written with doodles and all. Some were commissioned for events around Charleston while others were written and inspired by local places.

In the third row sat Amakers parents and wife: another source of writing material and inspiration for Amaker. Amongst some of his shorter works comes this piece about his wife:

My wife knows me.
Like she knows our garden.
All green thumbs.
A nurturer of soil
And soul.
I am now full of growth,
Leaning toward her light.
-Sun/light

Amaker read many of his poems from his family section during the release reading. In the physical book, each poem is accompanied by a black and white photo of the family member he invokes in that piece.

Amaker talked a lot about the inspirations he had for the book.One, the path of hurricanes in the Atlantic and how they resemble the path of slave ships. Another, the way thumbprints look like tree rings.

As with many of his individual poems, his inspirations lie within and around the natural world and the idea of connectedness: how every root and every tree is connected to every other piece of nature, every person to every other, every piece of life to every other.

Reading each poem is like reading a piece of history whether that be the history of Charleston, the South as a whole, or of Amaker’s personal life. Empath paints a full picture of what it means to be a piece of the whole.

I’m thankful to Marcus Amaker for his work and engagement with the poetry community and the Charleston community and finding a place for both of those to sit together.

With the collection there is a complementing jazz album that can be found here in digital download and as a CD or on Vinyl: https://marcusamakerstore.com/