Love'Koo.

Love'Koo by Kwasi Ramsey Black Alchemist Press, January 2001, $11.95, ISBN 0-967-10826-8

With sensual symmetry, Kwasi Ramsey captures the complexities of masculine convention in his second collection of poetry, Love'Koo. A work that is as cautiously crass as it is recklessly romantic, Love'Koo is erotic and embarrassing -- intimate enough to bring blushes to bashful brown girls housing wayward, womanly hearts.

In 70 pages, Ramsey brandishes bravado with lines like "women are like basketball/everyman has a starting five/and one coming off the bench" and then delves into the depths of devotion with metaphoric murmurs like "... your water fingers/greening light/flowering my head with the thought of you ... in the twilight of/the gods absence/thank you for loving me." The reader gets the sense that she has entered an alternate universe, one in which men are painfully honest and wear their emotions like nicotine patches, in vain attempts to control love addictions. When Ramsey's work whispers, "i am nothing more/than brown flesh/wrapped around/yo fiery spirit," and lauds the lady who "smiles watermelon/and chickenbreast kisses/with the candy scent of sweet potatoes/cornrowed in her hair" these addictions seem not only incurable, but infectious as well.

The consummate artist, Ramsey wields erotic imagery as his deftest device and to stellar effect, but the poet takes sporadic pauses from eroticism to deal with other of love's complications. He infuses recurring, revelatory pieces about the emotional effects of a father's absenteeism to complement the ever-unfurling theme of ingenuousness. With the lines "my father has superpowers/the ability to be invisible/whenever i reach out to him," Ramsey invites the reader to step beyond the veil of bravado and into his vast vaults of vulnerability.

Here, the journey is far more important than the destination. When readers enter Ramsey's labyrinth, with all its contradictions and complicities, they will continue turning the pages in pursuit of more meaning, long after the book is closed.

Stacia Brown is a recent graduate of Trinity College with a degree in Literature. She resides in Baltimore, MD where she is an editorial intern for Black Words Press.