Review: KB Brookins’s FREEDOM HOUSE as Manifesto

KB Brookins’s Freedom House as Manifesto

Reviewed by Katherine O’Hara

Freedom House. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2023.

To hold history in your hands, pain-heavy but hopeful, that is what it is like to read Freedom House by KB Brookins. This collection is a movement, a world in bloom, a freedom house being built before the reader’s eyes as they move section by section, room by room.

Freedom House opens with a quote from Kiese Laymon about the possibility of transformation and how such is not possible without “honest acceptance of who you are, whence you came, what you do in the dark, and how you want to love and be loved tomorrow.” 

Brookins, a Black, queer, and trans writer and activist in Texas writes about the opposition they experience while also addressing a hopeful future. The collection physically moves readers from room to room, framing the poems in such a way that readers reflect on how the layers of the personal and the political become more intimate across the collection’s different rooms. Before the reader moves from sections Foyer, Dining Room, Bedroom, and Living Room, we sit with “Black Life circa 2029” at the collection’s start: “I love my land, comfortable; I love this life, loud. / I have a living–/ I have a room.”

I appreciate the duality here. How the poet acknowledges the importance of a physical space that upholds safety and acceptance while also acknowledging that existence as a whole should be held with the same grace and protections. Not only in the spaces we inhabit literally, but also politically, socially, and culturally.

Honest acceptance continues throughout the collection from lines “I am becoming / my own best man” to how “a Black boy can be a river [if you let him]” in the T-Shot series of poems. Brookins holds space for where discovery happens: where the heart of who someone is can sink in and just be, showing how one wants to love and be loved tomorrow. How being one’s whole self should be met with grace and not opposition.

But the joy that can be built within a freedom house is not addressed without the contrast of what lies outside. Thinking back to Laymon’s quote, I can see how Brookins also showcases the atmosphere of “whence you came and what you do in the dark” not only in relation to how one views their own history but also how the United States and its systems function. Brookins does not shy away from the political landscape: calling out gentrification, racial politics, climate change, ERCOT, and white America.

While whiteness would prefer to hide from its roots, from its inheritance of blood shed, Brookins shines light on “from whence you came,” stating in “Bare Minimum, Or To-Do List For white America”: “Don’t think that–due to fear planted in the roots of your kin–you can’t get rid of yourself today.” And poems like “Ars Poetica with Election Results Still in Limbo,” also address the inconsistencies of white feminism, how the sentiment “difference doesn’t define us” is missing the mark. To not acknowledge that a country was built on the labor and enslavement of Black people, and to ignore the ways this country continues to use difference to instill systemic issues of inequality, makes trying to change these very systems of oppression impossible. Change cannot begin without acknowledgement of the many layers of what needs to be changed.

For a freedom house to truly be free, it requires protection and hope, yes, but it also requires reflection, for readers from different backgrounds and experiences to face themselves head-on, and call to action how they can be better community members within political systems that desperately need changing.

It should also be stated, especially when we read Brookins’s poem “I’m Not Writing Anything Else Where white People are the Assumed Audience,” that this freedom house is ultimately one readers from different backgrounds are looking into. Brookins writes “forget rage mistaken as hate forget Defund The Police Is Not Realistic forget Nancy Pelosi & the police forget the bombings & shootings & recanting all this shit so you can feel me less forget the stares forget ignorance assumed of the reader forget mistakes forget writing more like them…” This house is not being built for the white reader and this house should also exist outside of their interpretation, opinion, and gaze.

Brookins has the ability to leave readers in a sense of reckoning at the end of each poem. The collection ends with a manifesto to live, stating “I think I’m ready to house myself out of shame.”  KB calls readers to think more critically and advocate intentionally. Readers can feel this communion outside of shame and into curiosity when attending one of KB’s readings. From Kansas City’s AWP to the Black Queer Emancipation open mic hosted by Ebony Stewart, KB and Freedom House move audiences to consider how we set intentions for ourselves, our communities, and our futures.

When concluding  Brookins’s collection, readers are ready to house themselves out of shame, and, as Brookins states, “once the terrible news gets better, we live.”

For the latest events and announcements, stay up-to-date with KB at https://earthtokb.com/ whose memoir Pretty from Penguin Random House is now available for purchase.

About Katherine O’Hara

KATHERINE O'HARA received an MFA with Distinction from UNCW and is a Tin House Workshop alumna. She is a freelance marketer for Macmillan Speakers Bureau and Macmillan Audio (Macmillan Publishers) among others. Katherine received a notable in Best American Essays 2023 and her writing has appeared in the Hayden's Ferry Review, NELLE, Artemis Journal, and YES POETRY among others. She has worked formerly, in various capacities, for Beloit Poetry Journal, Ecotone, Lookout Books, and Hub City Press. She has volunteered formerly as marketing manager of Longleaf Review and prose reader at Electric Literature and storySouth. As far as writing, she is revising her hybrid novel that features poetic interpretations of grief in rural Louisiana, where her family is from.

About KB Brookins

KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty released on May 28, 2024 with Alfred A. Knopf. Follow them online at @earthtokb.

(Photo by Mama Duke)