SOURCE: Scroggins, Mark. Review of Whatsaid Serif, by Nathaniel Mackey.African American Review 34, no. 3 (fall 2000): 555-58.

In the following review, Scroggins praises the cross-culturality of Mackey's Whatsaid Serif.

Whatsaid Serif, Nathaniel Mackey's third full-length volume of poetry, presents us with twenty-one new installments of the innovative, ongoing serial poem Song of the Andoumboulou, a work whose earlier movements appeared in Mackey's first two books of poetry Eroding Witness (U of Illinois P, 1985) and School of Udhra (City Lights, 1993). The Andoumboulou are a somewhat shadowy people alluded to in the cosmology of the Dogon people of Mali. Originally dwelling in area later to be settled by the Dogon, the Andoumboulou were small red people, “an earlier, flawed or failed form of human being”—or, as Mackey tends to think of them, “a rough draft of human beings.” The Andoumboulou are incomplete, unfinished, and thereby reflect a wider human condition...