Across the poems in Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade, Samuel takes on an acreage of serious subjects—from language, trauma, violence (cultural, historical, universal, and domestic), social policing, immigrant reality, childhood to slave trade. But, as the eponymous poem intimates, it is not thematic range alone, but also a command of poetic language and its various modalities that is the locus of Samuel’s claim to distinction. For one, the poem, which closes out the book tags history to resonate the dehumanizing violence of slave trade while impressing a thorough sense of trauma through a personal perspective rendered in insinuations charged with universal overtone:  

Memories haunt the glassless frame. 

I peer at it long enough to sculpt Pa towelling the piled bricks. 

Each whack a violence rummaging where beauty would later touch. 

The not enough-ness of dust, surrounding us like cruel jinns. 

If the title of the poem, ‘Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade, implies an ironic juxtaposition between the natural world and the human brutality of slavery, then the ‘not enough-ness of dust’ surrounding the labourers like ‘cruel jinns’ evokes the omnipresent yet often unacknowledged spectre of death and suffering that haunted enslaved people. The simile is particularly apt because in Islamic mythology as inherited from pre-Islamic lore, Djinns are as living and morally diverse as our awareness of our human and physical existence. However, in all their supposed existence, through myths and theology, they live in the fantastical dimension. Although they are real in those realms, they are incorporeal—or at least invisible to us—to the point of comfortable disregard on our part. So, it is through the deeper paradoxical insinuation of the simile that the poem creates a palpable sense of the oppressive atmosphere and the constant threat of violence, both physical and psychological, that permeates the harrowing history of slavery. 

The final lines—‘A decorum next to slavery / it demands your Negro hands’—further reflects the dehumanization inherent in slavery, its cynical, utilitarianist reduction of individuals to their labour value and racial identity. The ‘decorum’ ironically refers to the systematic brutality of the slave trade disguised as a civilized economic system. Through the visceral imagery and fractured narrative of the poem, Samuel forces us to confront the raw, lived experience of this brutal moment in our social and political history and its corresponding dread. He challenges us to see beyond sanitized historical accounts and recognize the enduring impact of the traumatic legacy of enslavement. 

Despite the concentration on these heavy motifs, Samuel is still able to write about reminiscences as delicate, emotional, and nostalgic as childhood adventures with proportionate clarity. For instance, in ‘A Boy Ago’, although intimating youthful recklessness alongside immersive playfulness, Samuel’s recollection offers several statements where love and a brotherhood built around mutual protection are clearly recognized as cornerstones of a fulfilled childhood: 

If I’m worn out, he troubles the water on my behalf. 

If he is spent, I win the tide to his side 

and we both race to satisfaction, 

else this longing burns out. 

Yet the poems—with the noted exception of ‘Praise for the Inner Lining of my Morphing Apparel’ and ‘A Boy Ago’—are also compartments of ornamental repetitions. In ‘A Wreckful Planting of Small Pockets of Thirst’—a poem in which the speaker tries coping with a profound sense of ‘grief’—for instance, the second stanza is essentially a shorter or more compressed version of the fourth just with different figurations. His initial struggle with emotional inarticulation echoes across the poem towards romantic frustration, in content as well as in effect.