Interview with Akhim Yuseff Cabey, Winner of the 2024 Rising Poet Prize
Winner of the 2024 Rising Poet Prize
Akhim Yuseff Cabey for “Olentangy River, 2019”
Akhim Yuseff Cabey was born in the Bronx, New York. A Pushcart Prize-winning Black author, his debut poetry collection Get Funky, Get Swoll is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. His work has appeared in Colorado Review, RHINO, Indiana Review, The Florida Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, and elsewhere. A six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, he now lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches Adult Education. He can be found on Instagram @the_fit_poet.
Of the winning poem, guest judge Morgan Parker said:
“It was a tough choice, but I picked this poem because of the way it balances narrative mystery and vivid imagery through careful pacing and thoughtful line breaks. I loved how the couplet form accentuated the poem’s earnest grappling with difference and otherness.”
Interview with Akhim Yuseff Cabey
by Marcella Haddad
Marcella Haddad: What was the original inspiration for “OLENTANGY RIVER, 2019”?
Akhim Yuseff Cabey: “Olentangy River, 2019” is the flagship poem for my second full-length collection entitled Sizzle and Hiss, which celebrates psycho-spiritual comradery, friendship, and kinship between black men. The poem is closely autobiographical, and the tension between the mid-western black male and the northeastern black male in these lines was something I experienced when I moved to Columbus, Ohio for graduate school in my early twenties. Because I didn’t drive at the time, I rode the bus that first year, and as sophisticated and stylish as I’d carried myself, I was perplexed and put-off by these down and out “country” black men who rode buses with their poles and buckets and tackle just to fish the shallow waters of the Scioto River. I think, too, there may have been some underlined anti-blackness at work in my perception of these men. The feeling, I’d concluded, was mutual, which is, terribly, too common a result of white supremacy on the black mind. The original inspiration of this poems comes out of a nurtured and cultivated love for black people in general and especially those brothers along the rocky banks of the river who I was taught to despise, just as I had, at one time in my life, my own reflection.
Haddad: How did you go about choosing the epigraph for this poem?
Cabey: The stout stake of emotion of this poem is love borne of the commonality of the black male experience in the United States. I am endeavoring in Sizzle and Hiss to focus almost entirely on my adoration for the bonds shared by black men. And say what you want to say about the bible—and a lot of terrible things have been and will continue to be said—but I’ve never heard a legitimate argument about the writing being bad. I chose the epigraph because I want a layer of spirituality to permeate the book. This particular proverb spoke to me when I read it, and in turn I spoke to it, and decided to grant it permission to live amid the poem individually and the book as a whole.
Haddad: Tell us about the revision process for this poem.
Cabey: The original identity of “Olentangy…” centered around the conflict or tension between the young black man I was and the older black men I supposed these ghetto anglers to be. I went through any number of drafts resolving that tension, finding wonderful and wise ways to say I love you to these black fishermen. But in the end, there was still something missing, something off about what I’d produced, and I didn’t dare submit it for publication. The suspicious death of Amber Evans, an anti-racist activist, in 2019 haunted me for years prior to drafting the poem. Her body was found in March of that year in the Scioto River, a few months after she’d been reported missing. When I realized I didn’t just want to bond with these black fishermen, but that I also wanted these elders to make sense of Amber’s passing, I knew I needed to include her in these lines. The fate of black men and black women are inexorably connected within a system of white supremacy, and once I allowed that reality to exist in the space of professing my love for these black fishermen, the poem, as it said, wrote itself.
Haddad: How does this poem fit into your body of work? Do you typically write about similar themes?
Cabey: My full-length debut collection, Get Funky, Get Swoll (Black Lawrence Press, 2026), focuses on the regenerative love of black and women, sexual racism, colorism, and the impact of predominantly white media imagery on the black mind and body, among other related topics of the black experience. “Olentangy River, 2019,” follows the same thematic path, but with a hyperfocus on black male relationships and how black men attempt to both survive and flourish within this culture that succeeds far too often to undermine the dynamics and dimensions of their human hearts. For me, these are the most relevant human themes of our times, and I have no desire to write about anything else.
Haddad: What are some of your poetic influences, either writers, historical events, or something else?
Cabey: I grew up reading science-fiction, detectives thrillers, and listening to love pop ballads. When I wasn’t doing that, I was throwing and catching touchdowns in the narrow streets of my Bronx neighborhood and falling in love. I relived much of my days over and over in my mind before I went to sleep at night, and so everything in my life seemed like a story to me. Sometime early in high school, I read James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” and saw something of my own reflection and imagination in those pages. By the time I’d graduated college, I’d consumed much of Baldwin’s work and tattooed his last name on one shoulder and a one-sentence quote from one of his essays on the other shoulder. As a result, I came to abhor cryptic poetry that hurt my brain to read and did absolutely nothing to or for my heart, and so for years I avoided poetry completely in lieu of prose because I thought I had to sound like canonical white authors who I couldn’t relate to. But sometime after graduate school, I came across Tim Seibles’ poem “Slow Dance” from his collection, Hurdy Gurdy, and I was stunned by the freedom and casualness and inclusivity of his voice. I never thought I’d be so moved by another’s work as I had been by Baldwin’s, but I was, and it was around that time, a little later in life than most, that I began to write poetry about playing ball on the block and falling in love.
Haddad: How did you decide on the ending stanza for the poem?
Cabey: For much of the poem, which is largely autobiographical, the narrator describes first his disgust and then awe and adoration for these down and out fishermen, his brethren, his brothers in arms. He realizes he is no different, no better, no more lovely than they are, so those italicized lines of the last stanza is a move to connect our powerful and sacred voices not just in honor of ourselves, but in concern for the death of a black woman.