Throughout his new collection Map to the Stars, Matejka shapes from memories’ constellations his poems of Midwestern adolescence, black manhood, and the cultural moment of the 1980s. In “Do Work,” Matejka writes of “the crass powerlessness of not having,” but he defies this powerlessness by figuratively placing the stars within the hands of the African American fathers, uncles, and sons of his youth. He takes what seems a remote galaxy and makes it familiar and tangible, reworking older poetic descriptions of the stars (spilling, shining, twinkling) and intertwining the celestial—the possible, the impossible, hope, and the imaginary of outer space—with the lives of Black men. After all, Matejka suggests, what is the universe or its stars but the stuff of Black lives, a figurative space that represents escape, dreaming, or the available choices?

WELCOME BACK TO EARTH

& these Indiana stars spill

like Pops’s generous nightcap.

These stars glint
like a doorknob in a night-light.

Stars squinting like somebody’s uncle
shooting set shots in College Park.

from “Welcome Back to Earth” in Adrian Matejka, Map to the Stars

JNH