A Literary Mapping of Horsepower by Joy Priest (Winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry)
by Allison Pitinii Davis
My time spent with Joy Priest’s Horsepower —a poetic exploration of gender, race, and class in Louisville, Kentucky—coincided with the nationwide activism protesting the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Three months earlier, Louisville police murdered Breonna Taylor in her apartment. Days ago, Louisville police and the Kentucky National Guard murdered David McAtee at his business. In “No Country for Black Boys,” Priest writes, “when walking while black / i am always there. i patrol. i follow / from a 7-Eleven. conceal your / dark skin in a hoodie.”
The stories of these atrocities, like Horsepower, reiterate the city’s segregation and discrimination, especially in the “predominantly black West End.” Location plays a prominent role in the Horsepower, starting from the first poem where the speaker can see the twin steeples of Churchill Downs, the site of Kentucky Derby, “in its entirety / from my top step” (“Horsepower”). As the collection lists location after location—addresses, businesses, highways, neighborhoods, routes—a map emerges, and that map is an argument: these are the locations that matter. The collection centers the margins of Louisville until the omnipresent racetrack fades into the background. In result, Louisville’s communities, histories, and inequalities emerge.
Literary mapping is a useful tool for plotting a book’s verbal world onto its spatial one. In the introduction to the Literary Map of Detroit, Frank D. Rashid writes that “the lines and shadings in Detroit area maps are especially significant, marking the stark inequalities of American society….The poets and storytellers who have written about Detroit understand that something important has happened here, and they share an impulse to reveal it. It’s difficult to live in this city, to care about it, without feeling the need to capture the experience, to define it properly, to let the outside world know about what has happened here.” As Rashid maps Detroit’s literary heritage, the map below roughly plots the Louisville presented in Priest’s collection. Many of the map markers are centered around two locations. The first is Churchill Downs and the neighborhood where the speaker grows up with her white mother and white supremacist grandfather. The other is West Louisville, home of the speaker’s black father and family she’s never met. Other locations on the map include an escape to a motel parking lot in Okolona and a reminiscent look back to the city from La Grange. Each location marker on the map opens an excerpt[i] from the collection about the place. Mapped out, the excerpts reveal a constellation of relationships and divisions that the speaker spends the collection physically traversing in verse.
Zoom in for details and click on pins for annotations from Horsepower.
The book begins in the speaker’s childhood home that is so close to Churchill Downs that “only Longfield [Avenue] & a chain-link fence // separates the horses’ air from mine” (“Horsepower”). The book—from its title to its guiding metaphors—never veers far from the Derby. The speaker comes of age through the race. Her 1988 birth year auspiciously coincides with Winning Colors winning the Derby—only the third filly to do so after “Regret, 1915; and Genuine Risk, 1980— / our names for girls” (“Winning Colors, 1988”). At age eight, the speaker sells “the VIP spaces of our carport” to the rich, touristy race-goers (“Derby”). As a young adult during Derby Cruising festivities, she learns her lover has found another (“God of the Motorcade [2005]”), and when racially-profiled while driving, the speaker uses a race metaphor to describe her escape: “When they lifted the gate/and brought me out into the light, I knew to run” (“Ode to My First Car, 1988 Cutlass Supreme Classic 307 V8, Dual Exhaust”). While much of the book circles around the Derby, it ultimately decenters it—the Derby is “a distant Oz” reserved for wealthy spectators from outside of the neighborhood (“Derby”).
When the narration moves from the Churchill Downs community to the West End, the map helps readers envision that, for the speaker, the separation between the neighborhoods is as much of a social distance as a geographic one. The speaker uses a biological image of separation to communicate how far she initially feels from the black family that she was never told she had:
Beyond the spires
is a larger world I do not know
exists. A mile West, in my line
of vision, is a family
I do not know
I have.
In that corner of the city
—shaped like it's separating
from the land like a cell in mitosis,
straining across the Ohio River
to the north—
my great aunt, black matriarch, rocks
on her blue porch
& my father, my father,
just a couple of blocks away from her ("Horsepower")
Reading this title poem while looking at the map, a reader can visually see its lines: the proximity of the two neighborhoods; the shape of the West End bulging, cell-like, into the bend of the Ohio River; the foreshadowing that part of the work of this collection is going to be bridging the distance between these two communities. And indeed, throughout the three sections of the book, map markers between the neighborhoods populate as the speaker zooms between them not on a horse but in muscle cars revving with their own lyricism and horsepower: a white Plymouth, a grey Caprice, a boxed Chevy, a ’69 Oldsmobile with “Crocodile paint” and “Scent-clouds / of motor-oil” (“Little Lamp”), a 1988 Cutlass Supreme Classic that “vein-armed men air-boxed // over who’d be the one to polish it down” (“Ode to my First Car”).
The speaker’s drives to West Louisville coincide with learning about race and survival from her father. In the “My Father Teaches Me” series, the father teaches his daughter to navigate the racial inequality of the city: “My Father Teaches Me How to Disappear,” “My Father Teaches Me How to Slip Away,” “My Father Teaches Me About the Bees,” “My Father Teaches Me How to Handle a Pistol.” In “Slip Away,” we learn that the father has been kept out of the speaker’s life by her racist, gun-toting, white grandfather. Now, however, that the grandfather is bed-bound and unaware, the mother finally brings the speaker to the father waiting on the front porch. Seeing him, the speaker’s “horse mind flickers— / When I step into him & look back at my mother, she/Is on the other side.” This movement across a threshold of race and ancestry arises again in “Ode to My First Car.” When the speaker is racially profiled when driving—“On the citation there was a box labeled ‘Black’ / and it was checked,”—the speaker’s white mother asks, “what did you do to make him think you were?” The speaker answers: “The fact was I was. I am.” The speaker explains that what is wrong is not her blackness but her white mother’s colorblindness, her “refusal to see me / apart from her, across our historical chasm.” Horsepower begins with the chasm between the speaker’s parents and their communities, but by the end of the collection, the poems have revved and powered their way across the rift and leave us with this vital map of their journey.
[i] A note that Google Map annotations were unable to preserve certain formatting elements, including italics and long lines. The locations are approximations based on the text and research.
Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab, 2017). Her work focuses on the northeast Ohio Rust Belt.