Thomas Bonner, Jr.
Review of City of Hey Baby, Poems by Patrice Melnick (Finishing Line Press, 2020, 27pp)
“Dear Rock n Bowl,/ Your bowling lanes are uneven…” strikes a
quirky note about a quirky place and an equally quirky New Orleans. “Rock n Bowl,” brief and rhythmic, captures the intriguing nature of a place of dancing and bowling, a place like New Orleans, where the expected fails to occur and the unexpected sinks its treble hook into both its residents and visitors. City of Hey Baby is a celebration of its mind and heart. The poetry has a spontaneous quality, a musical cadence (“synchronized pounding”), and images that reflect the sources of its inspiration. Having come to New Orleans after time in Alaska and the Central African Republic, Patrice Melnick spent thirteen years living in shotgun styled houses along the Mississippi River and near Bayou St. John. Her years of teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana, an historically Black University, introduced her, a native of Dallas, Texas, to the dominant ethnic and racial community of the city. Dance, a central element of her and the city’s lives, leaps forward in the first poem “Dancing at Tipitina’s After the Flood,” as “I sway in the blue/ arms of ‘God knows whom.’” Like so many references to the city, before-and-after the flood of 2005 is a dividing line here, and the poem revels in the spirit of a people pushing “past weary houses and yards of car corpses.” The damaged appliances stand street side in “Refrigerator Lesson”: “dented metal boxes/ bursting with despair.” As in Melnick’s memoir Po-boy Contraband: From Diagnosis Back to Life (based on her earlier book Turning Up the Volume), dance and music contribute to poems throughout this slim but rich volume. “Sunday gospel music” rises above damage in “Fifty Days After Hurricane Katrina on Dumaine Street.” In 31
