I'm Always So Serious
I'm Always So Serious by Karisma Price
When the poet Karisma Price writes, “Each of my days is a failed manifesto,” it’s just one instance of many in which she ignites, simultaneously, pain as well as hope.
Price’s debut poetry collection, I’m always so serious, holds within it words splayed every which way across eighty-three pages, sometimes scaring the punctuation flat off the page. In the critically acclaimed work, the New Orleans native mines a mother lode of loss, musing on Blackness while family and grief stand shoulder to shoulder with a fierce testimony to love and truth.
It’s a remarkable book rooted in New Orleans, a treatise on the flawed American South that manages to be both tender and powerful. She channels and conjures voices from James Booker to James Baldwin, Homer to Beyoncé, a powerful chorus seen through her lens.
Sidney Mack
Karisma Price, reading from her poetry collection "I'm always so serious"
In a conversation that played out on the nineteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Price, who grew up Uptown, looks back to that time in her life, and how her journey has moved forward. “I was ten,” she said. “It was a very confusing time. Today, when I woke up, I didn’t realize at first. Then I got on social media and saw the posts. It’s an interesting day to ponder and reflect. It’s been so long ago, and at the same time it hasn’t. Boil advisories still happen. This city’s infrastructure is still broken.”
The collection isn’t ponderous. It has heft, but also empathy. Many of Price’s best moments shine in single explosive sentences.
Her Katrina story, like so many others, involves leaving home and not being able to come back, experiencing crowded sheltering with extended family, being moored in a strange city—in her case Dallas—so far from the familiar. “We didn’t like Dallas, but we lived there for a year,” she said. Trying to figure out what was going on led Price to carry around a toy video camera and pretend to document what was happening. “I started thinking about living through a disaster, and how these things should be captured, remembered.”
Documenting—tragedy, feelings, racism, family—is a skill Price has honed over time. Words have always mattered to her, since she begged her parents to read to her, only to insist “again!” after they read, “The End.” “My mother said I wore them out with the reading,” she said. Price remembers being inspired early on by her parents who were laser-focused on education, then by a series of teachers at the Willow School at Lusher. “I was in the seventh grade when I decided I wanted to be a poet. I wasn’t sure if I could make a living doing it, but it was the first art that I took seriously. To me, poetry is prayer.”
Price earned her MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was a Writer in the Public Schools Fellow. She was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize and awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from The Poetry Foundation. Currently an assistant professor of poetry at Tulane University, Price also flexes her artistic muscles as a photographer, media artist, and screenwriter. But poetry stands alone in the sense that its narrative doesn’t have to be linear, she said. “It can be tangential. It’s driven by emotion. Feelings are encouraged. And a lot of times in life that isn’t the case.”
Rosalyn Ransaw
Karisma Price
For the past five years, Price has labored at teaching undergraduates at Tulane University to love words. “I try to give them a place where they can be vulnerable,” she said. “It’s challenging. Sometimes teaching feels like a cross between a standup comedy performance and a group project where you’re the one that does most of the work. As a teacher you talk a lot, but I’m more of a listener. And the students are interesting, sometimes more interesting than the professors.”
Published in 2023, I’m always so serious began as a graduate thesis inspired by both New Orleans and New York. But the collection is ultimately dedicated to her home city. “For the ones that raised me: my parents and New Orleans.”
[Read this: "'Mama's Blues': A poem from Baton Rouge’s new Poet Laureate, Dr. Taylor Scott"]
The book’s title is inspired by something Price has heard all her life. “People, even people who know me, always say to me, ‘Why are you so serious? You have a mean resting face. Why don’t you smile more?’ I’m just standing there. I’m just existing right there. Some people have a serious face when they are focusing on things. My face does that when I’m in my head. There’s nothing wrong with approaching life in a serious manner.”
While seriousness resonates throughout I’m always so serious, the collection isn’t ponderous. It has heft, but also empathy. Many of Price’s best moments shine in single explosive sentences. “Everything you fear soaringly keeps you alive.” It’s a truth that resonates, like so many of Price’s observations, cutting close to the bone, rewarding readers with insights that startle.
