Bridges to Build, Rivers to Cross Mountains to Move.

Bridges to Build, Rivers to Cross Mountains to Move by Kayo (Kraal Y. Charles) PAGAcommunications, 2000, $15.00 ISBN 0-970-17680-5

Kayo's first book of poetry emerges from the spoken word movement and moves beyond. The two things that come to mind while reading his poems are his heroic voice and his vulnerability. As an urban black male, coming of age during Generation X, he doesn't cower from unabashedly addressing his heart's emotional architecture, and he does it with more than mack daddy acrobatic rhapsodies. He writes about his insecurities ("Disgusted Love Is") and dejection ("I Fail to Forget") with both candor and nuance.

Clearly, he longs to explore more than words that are spoken. Sidestepping the spoken word label, Kayo even pens three sonnets, written in loose pentameter lines. One sore point in this debut collection is his end-stopped, largely exact rhyme. Kayo uses this in nearly half of his poetry, burdening his verse with a singsongy quality.

At his best, Kayo has the expansive, rolling generosity of an urban, postmodernist Walt Whitman. This is underscored in his poems "I Can Move Mountains" and "How Do We Know?" In the former, he wrestles with the redemptive power of confronting obstacles. In the latter--written in a young student's inquisitive voice--he challenges a public school science teacher's epistemological assumptions, dropping his own bittersweet science.