Brandon Shimoda’s The Girl Without Arms: A Review by J. A. Tyler

The trouble in reviewing a book like Brandon Shimoda’s The Girl Without Arms is that no matter what the reviewer says, no matter what excerpts are culled, the text will remain very difficult to define without simply saying: go read this book for yourself and see what you find in it.

from ‘IN AN ACT OF TERRIBLE VENGEANCE, I LOVE YOU’:

In a long driveway, and also drinking

Drinking, And also watching three deer

At the far end of a long driveway

Drinking from the arch of circumstance

Spirit bulbs, Bones glowing in pools of noses

Soft shanks, Earflaps dressed as news

Stand about the fields and listen

When I began reading The Girl Without Arms, I didn’t like it. It felt disjointed, like a message written and then torn to pieces and scattered in the wind – there was meaning within these poems, but that meaning seemed either buried beyond my skills or else purposefully withheld from view. But now that it has been a few weeks since I finished reading the book, I see that the poems have remained in my system in a kind of glacial-movement, a slow digesting.

from ‘SEVEN SATELLITES OF THE MOON’:

Alight into our neighborhood

Lick the steeples from balls to prayer

Upon the shanty dwellings

Intentions of dwellings to buildings are buildings for fires

Neighbors slink thirstily to

You love them you clear blankets for them

Fill the space with grapes and massage

Fancy the reverent bobbing wish the consecratory light of the cross

For me, the larger context of The Girl Without Arms is about poetry, what it is and how it is supposed to be understood. Even if Shimoda tells me exactly what these poems mean to him, and even if Black Ocean provides me with a background on the Japanese folklore that inspired this book, I still may not read these poems as I am supposed to, but I will read them and reread them because they are rhythm-full and lovely, because they are bloody in their tearing of poetic seams.

from ‘DEATH RICTUS IS A DREAM RICTUS’:

Let us promise to put ourselves to better use than a wedding dress

Let us be worn by death, better than this, a strong of soft shells pulled from a spiral of wet, fallopian ribbon taken into the mouth, opening in the sea, out of which a waterbird tears from the plague, tiny ringlets of blood and brain prove awful on the oil of the slow-moving waves, a column of devils shines upward

There are bodies in this book, sexual ties and tension, trees and talk of growing roots or moving upward. There are messages buried here and torn and burned. Reading The Girl Without Arms is traveling a maze with only the notion of an exit. These are clustered poems of goodness in language, and I can only suggest that you seek out what is in them.

The Girl Without Arms is available from Black Ocean.

J. A. Tyler is the author of A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed and founding editor of Mud Luscious Press. For more, visit: www.chokeonthesewords.com