A linguistically experimental and socially engaged collection of poems that examines questions of colorism within an economically driven world. In a collection of poems that collapses the spectrum between the theoretical and the personal, that is at once intimately lyric and researched, Isaac Pickell travels through various borderlands of space, memory, and identity in search of an “original shade.” In failing to find what he’s looking for, the poet is equally drawn to the beauty and cruelty of a world addled by capitalism, careening the reader into collisions with complicity and possibility. Enigmatic and striking, It’s not over once you figure it out offers rich, layered poetry that is tender with its subjects of generational trauma, liberation, and the Black and Jewish experience.
