Rain in Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson

In a series of “call and responses” whose various narrators engage in what might be called duets with Robert Johnson. With the refreshing and uncanny empathy for which she is admired and respected as a critic and poet, Blakely offers a fresh attention to Johnson’s music (her poems take their titles from his extraordinary compositions) in relation to her own abiding concerns with what she once called, in an essay about Eleanor Ross Taylor, “oh, dear God, let us outgrow those terms of race, class, and gender, but for now they’re what we’ve got—the hand life deals us.” …