reviewed on July 29, 2026
Ton-Aime’s first full-length collection opens in the mode of the siste viator: “Weary traveler,” he writes, in the persona of an historical Haitian seer, “if upon this ground / you stumble some two hundred years later, / and if you are of the kind, make a libation.” That second-person imperative is integral to Ton-Aime’s ambitions in Konbit, closing a temporal gap in order to track the ambivalent inheritances of Black history, in particular as they eventuate from the Haitian Revolution. As Ton-Aime perceives, those events redound into the present, so that we are almost always “hear[ing] the swift sound of our intent winged feet / hovering over the ground as the tanbou skips beats.”
Ton-Aime refers here to the Bois Caïman voodoo ceremony on the night of August 14, 1791, traditionally regarded as the origin of the Haitian Revolution. Presided over by the Houngan Dutty Boukman, the ceremony served as both religious ritual—permitted as such by white slave-owners—and covert strategic assembly, where more than two hundred slaves planned their rebellion against the colony’s planter aristocracy. The event is at the center of Konbit, a word that itself refers to the concept of “true collectivism,” as Ton-Aime explains, “where neighbors take turns to help each other in everything from rearing children to harvesting the land.”
Reminiscent of Elizabeth Holmes’s excellent Passing Worlds: Tahiti in the Era of Captain Cook, as well as of Martha Collins’s now legendary Blue Front, Konbit develops this history through a series of persona poems in the voice of an unnamed seer and other historical figures; more than mere dress-up, Ton-Aime uses persona to meditate on the internal tensions that slavery produces in its victims, inheritors, and even perpetrators. In “A Mistress in Bed with her Husband on the Eve of the Bois Caïman Ceremony,” for instance, evocative of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “A Bronzeville Mother…,” he ventriloquizes the ever-present anxiety of the slave-owner’s wife; “a woman can only watch her man’s daughter busying / in the kitchen, and wonder how nature can bestow upon // a wretched girl such beautiful eyes, so blue, so foreign.”
Ton-Aime is especially invested in the ambivalences or tensions internal to inherited language, a master’s tool which the Haitians here subvert and repurpose. “A nod is a not a nod if the left eye shifts,” Ton-Aime writes in “Pidgin—Nation.” “Twice, / if the lips touch and teeth are shown short after, / we have a no. It is revolution work / not a master-slave understanding.” If present-day idiom seems somewhat out of place in these historical monologues—a face is “vaguely familiar,” Ton-Aime writes, or a slave-owner “had it coming”—that linguistic wobble may be a productive one, collapsing chronological history into what Ton-Aime and others identify as “revolution[ary] time.” “The moon,” he writes of this time that is no-time and all-time, “stays long past noon.”
A hybrid of myth, history, autobiographical coming-of-age, and contemporary critique, Konbit collapses time less persuasively in its references to up-to-the-moment geopolitics, including in its treatment of ICE and the genocide in Palestine. More to-the-point in this collection is a poem on the hypocrisies of NGO and United Nations aid workers, rendered in the voice of a young Haitian sex worker:
Long ago, I learned
the bluer the logo on the SUV, the more likely
a gun can be pulled, or anal can be requested.
The night opens my legs with large, white hands
that secure tomorrow.
Relatively unheralded in contemporary poetry, Ton-Aime is an important new interlocutor in a movement that I have elsewhere described as a “new historical poetics.” Like the best writers of that movement—Holmes and Collins, as well as Edgar Garcia and Henk Rossouw—Ton-Aime turns a critical eye on the pretensions of his own historicism. “Look at you,” he writes in the voice of his Haitian seer, “digging in the past and thinking / you’re it. You ain’t.” That line break is a brilliant one, marking both an inherited connection to and impossible severance from the histories in which one digs. “You ain’t,” Ton-Aime’s seer insists. And he is.