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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s The River is Rising (Autumn House Press) is a poignant call to action. In this brilliant work, the erudite poet nudges readers to a higher calling: not only to be observers of, but also to act in countering humanity’s inhumanity. She draws urgent attention to, among man’s worst atrocities against man, the brutal, greed-driven wars—like the one that decimated her home country of Liberia, the death penalty in some of our so-called ‘civilized’ nations, and the political/social oppression of disadvantaged minorities around the world.

“If you can sit beside the river long enough,” Professor Wesley urges in Lamentation after Fourteen Years, “the tide will come in. You’ll be there for the river’s rising—that urgent leaping only a river can make.” It does not take long before she justifies why we should be observant beside the river. She bemoans how “cruel warfare haunts us like weeds left so long, they eat up the yard. We sit here, God, and we say give us peace.” The professor asks only for peace because, as she heartbreakingly concedes, “After so many years, we long only for the end of war—not for bread or beef; not for gin or rice, not for roads or guns, not for street lights…” for, I suppose, all these things are of little consequence under the uncertain cloud that hovers over life when war reigns.

In Bringing Closure, Professor Wesley tackles government-sanctioned murders when she decries how “we all wait for the executioner’s poke into vein, blood meeting poison…dishing out death in small poking needles. [And] tomorrow, I’ll tell my eleven year old daughter how we have all murdered another human being.”

In taking on the plight of Tibetan monks as a microcosm of disadvantaged minorities around the world, Professor Wesley writes in Four Tibetan Monks on a Wall at the Arts Council, that “Only the first Dalai Lama will tell you how these monks came to be, caught in a whirlwind in a world that has forgotten how to give back freedom to those whose freedoms we’ve stolen.”

This work challenges the world in general and Liberians in particular, [especially Liberians in the diaspora] to reflect deeply, to reconsider, to act, to rally and save our common world, and the Liberian nation state. Professor Wesley reinforces this point in the poem she titled, aptly, In the Ruined City. Therein she writes:

The men have forgotten they used to be men, and the women sit by the roadside wondering what has happened to this land. If those outside of here do not come, Liberia will drown in this rain.

Professor Wesley, in The River is Rising, deploys the full range of poetic artistry—she digs deep, evoking emotion (don’t be surprised if you got misty-eyed at some point), curiosity, images, and interminable ideas.

I love this book of poetry. Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is one who is truly African and American, unlike many who have been assigned the name in reparation for a history ancestors experienced. I feel that I can say this, since I am African-American, or, as Du Bois puts it, "I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil" (The Souls of Black Folk, from "The Forethought"). Dr. Wesley's poetry speaks of a different veil, the veil of assumptions. Many assume what Africa is like, but Dr. Wesley has actually experienced first-hand a taste of Africa, and she shares her poetic meals with her family of readers, meals served with American appetizers and desserts. Her poetry is able to reflect the true realities of a portion of Africa as well as some of the realities of a portion of America. She voices her 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' very poetically. She writes of Pittsburgh and Michigan as well as of Liberia, and her experiences tempt this reader. Dr. Wesley offers in this book of poetry tidbits of death, of birth, and of life, all with that special second sight that she has.
I agree with the blurb on the back of the book: "One senses in her that rare combination of someone who has been deeply schooled in both literature and life, and who has integrated those two into a deeply felt and shrewd worldview." For example, in the moving poem, "Memories," Dr. Wesley relays the experience of another "foreigner" arriving in America: "She's talking of years ago when she, / arriving in America, like me, one bundle of clothing,/ her breath of air and hoping like me, just for one more day." The persona goes on to say, poignantly, "and then I come to stand here and laugh here, / and cry here about my own war, clinging to my own past and a war still being fought at home." Dr. Wesley's poetry draws from that controversial term, universal, that term Stephen Henderson calls a "cop out." Sometimes in life, however, we need to cop out. It is what keeps us sane sometimes, for we do often experience the same stuff sometimes. Thus, in this beautiful collection of poetry, Dr. Wesley invites us to laugh and cry with her and, thus, to cling to one more bit of our seemingly ephemeral sanity. Poetry does that for us sometimes. As Emily Dickinson wrote: MUCH madness is divinest sense/ To a discerning eye;/ Much sense the starkest madness./ `T is the majority." The poet is definitely not part of "the majority," at least not the good poets. Dr. Wesley is one of the good poets. In Toni Morrison's novels, the seemingly insane are the ones with all the knowledge, and these seemingly insane usually are African ancestors. Here's to our living African ancestor, who writes of her experiences, in Africa as well as in America, hoping to bring knowledge to her future, to her children as well as to other heirs of her art. In Dr. Wesley's poem, "Coming Home: For Besie-Nyesuah," the persona states the following in reference to the experience of coming to America: ". . .in the Diaspora. In America, we are the new nomads,/ the wanderers coming home or looking to make/ home or running away from home among new people,/ and, one by one, our children, who will never know/ where we really come from, are leaving only to come/ back to decorative lights/ Christmas trees, holiday/ music, and turkey baking in the oven, stuffing,/ and pies. We are becoming new people, I tell myself." In THE RIVER IS RISING, Dr. Wesley invites us all to become "new people," learning from ourselves as well as from others. This book is perfect for the holidays. It is quite timely and would make a great Christmas gift or any gift during this increasingly commercialized season. This book makes us want "to sit a while and think," as Lorraine Hansberry's African character, Asagai, advises in the play, A RAISIN IN THE SUN. "Never be afraid to sit a while and think." Buy the book; it will make you think.

This is a very mature, strong, full, vulnerable book. Like the river in its title, there is a certain ebb and flow between each poem in these pages. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, unlike many other bi-coastal writers, has discovered, finally, a voice that blends the Liberian repettion and musicality to the Midwestern (and now, Northeast) flat hills and flattened accents. Her stories are troubling--wars that are personal and contentious; issues of raising children in a space not her own, yet completely her own; finding new ways to negotiate the spaces she finds herself paddling in; a now adult daughter, emboldened by her college-freedom; coming to terms with the loss of her mother. These are the troubled waters of content in Jabbeh Wesley's new collection, but there is language here and tone that are adept at saying precisely what lies at the river's shallow edges and deep ends. Jabbeh Wesley has stories to tell & languages & music & precision to tell them.