A Choir of Honest Killers

A Love Letter to the Universe and a Scattered, Brilliant Joyride

My perspective on Buddy Wakefield’s poetic novel A Choir of Honest Killers is inextricably tied to my memory of his spoken-word performance one humid October night in Savannah, Georgia. One informs the other. He stretched and bounced on his toes as he delivered poems with glee-filled sincerity. The book’s cover will tell you that Wakefield is a three-time world champion spoken-word artist and the most toured performance poet in history with a good 18 years of touring under his belt. These titles seem appropriate given the way his energy filled the little venue, the way he invited the audience into his life for a breathless hour.

Wakefield’s language possesses an inherent musicality and pulls deep from the well of his spoken-word experience. The lines beg to be given voice and sung aloud. They have a beautiful cadence to them, rich and whole, short and powerful.

A Choir of Honest Killers paints a vivid picture of an eccentric and wondrous life, one so different from my own that I had to read it slowly and digest it in pieces. This book exudes weird. I say this as a proud weirdo, a queerdo, someone who believes the best things in life are strange and rare. Wakefield details the course of his life through poems and flashes of the moments that made him. His language possesses an inherent musicality and pulls deep from the well of his spoken-word experience. The lines beg to be given voice and sung aloud. They have a beautiful cadence to them, rich and whole, short and powerful. Reading Wakefield’s novel struck me the way church bells do: deep and resounding, a thrumming inside my chest. I did not always understand what he was getting at, but I wanted to, and that was more than enough.

Wakefield’s writing touches on tragedy in several pieces, such as in “Tetris,” where he writes, “I have never felt so alone. / There is a brief, haunting moment in the otherwise comical movie / Ant-Man and the Wasp, where a subatomic state is reached and / everything goes deathly silent. That’s where I was. Where the pain / actually breeches its own expanse.” Or in “Bois D’Arc” with the lines, “I’ve had to let him go. But not the love. / We get to keep that.” A Choir of Honest Killers is by turns painful, raw, and intimate, but it is also stirring, tender, and joyful. It plays a balancing act and manages levity, not taking itself too seriously for too long a time. Wakefield also drives home the importance of compassion in “The Gift of My Hate” with humble lines like, “Why are we not fighting fire with water?” and “Question / anything impractical to the eradication of suffering.”

Ultimately, Wakefield’s brilliance is in the deep human connection behind his words, the way he reminds the reader of the way certain coincidences reoccur over and over again. He notes poet Sarah Healy’s line, “The lesson / will be repeated / until you learn it.” A standout nod to Wakefield’s deep connectedness is “We Are in the Snack!,” a gorgeous celebration of love, a blissful incantation to the beauty of childhood. The poem nudges us to remember, “Miracles are just constant recurring reminders / of how much we forget to pay attention.”

Reading A Choir of Honest Killers reawakened me to the wonder of the mundane, everyday things I take for granted, and helped me see the connections between myself and the universe, the connections between myself and everyone I love.