[REVIEW] Becoming Coztototl by Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros

Posted on April 12, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros’s Becoming Coztototl is a short poetry collection that inhabits the interstitial space between this world and the spirit world, between Spanish and English, between the United States and Mexico. This is a collection about bodies and harsh realities, but also about hope, light, power, land, heritage, culture, and family. Hinojosa-Cisneros writes with conviction and strength, and these pages are a testament to that:

“As hijitos and hijitas sit in manmade cages,

detentions they will call them, their wings carry

los antepasados like rayos de luz within.

And when the cage gets lonelym los antepasados,

remind hijitas and hijitos of the land they stand on.”

Becoming Coztototl comes in at 36 pages, but its short length doesn’t detract from the punch it packs. Displaced bodies, trauma, the struggles of migration, the weaving in and out of cultures; it’s all present here, and Hinojosa-Cisneros tackles these topics with an open heart and brings the power of first-hand experience—as a woman of color, as a Tejana—to the page. More than poetry, the words in this book add up to a celebration of mestizaje and a song that tells of the beauty of mixed languages. However, despite all the light here, there is a scream at the heart of this collection that wants to destroy “systemic oppression” and free every “marginalized body.”

FlowerSong Press is doing important work by bringing voices like Hinojosa-Cisneros to readers, and this book is a strong addition to their catalog. Their aesthetic is authenticity and diversity, and Becoming Coztototl delivers both. Hinojosa-Cisneros’s writing is strong, but not angry. Despite the heavy topics the book deals with, there is a lot of light, a lot of hope, in its pages. Unity, family, and community emerge as the pillars that hold us up, and reading these poems is to witness how beauty and love can be found even in harsh times.

“Mi’ja you are more than

shared flesh. You are

warrior at evening time.

You are powerful voice

at morning prayer. You are

ancestral lucha burning

sage under your bar feet.”

Becoming Coztototl makes that fight communal, but it also reminds us if the beauty around it; the reasons why we keep fighting. Hinojosa-Cisneros is a fighter in that lucha, y estos poemas nos invitan a luchar con ella.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Séance in Daylight by Yuki Tanaka

Posted on April 11, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Yuki Tanaka’s Séance in Daylight, which won the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, is one of those rare poetry collections that appeal to me both as a lover of poetry and a fan of horror fiction. At once full of light and darkness, the poems in this short book cover a plethora of topics. The lack of central theme, however, doesn’t detract from the work because Tanaka’s voice and the combination between light and dark gives the collection a sense of cohesion.

Séance in Daylight is a superb title, and Tanaka delivers on everything it promises:

“A man drowned in a river.

We scoop up the water

and look at his face. Inside

his egg-shaped head, a white

spasm—death looks like birth.”

Ghosts, pain, transformation, and memories wrapped in the emptions they birthed are the elements Tanaka used here to build his tiny universe. This is a book I originally read in April of 2019, but the beauty of some of these poems made it linger in my mind, so I decided to bring it back for this National Poetry Month project. The best poetry, I think, paints pictures vividly using language, and that’s what Tanaka does here in every page. He tells stories that feel like gloomy fairytales, and that makes this feel much longer that it is.

Mentioning horror in a poetry review is odd, but it fits here. As the title suggests, Tanaka gets close to horror in these pages, often offering lines that could be considered spooky:

“She opened her mouth as if her throat were a bird

ready to leave her. I thought she was going to sing

for the dead, because she saw them always.”

Séance in Daylight holds secret conversation with other texts, which Tanaka reveals in the notes at the end. However, what matters most here is that the feverish nature of the writing creates a space in which the reader feel like they don’t always know if they’re witnessing a memory, a nightmare, a fever dream, or a hybrid creatures that brings them all together. Whatever the case, this chapbook is a great introduction to Tanaka’s work as well as an enjoyable slice of poetic darkness.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Louder Birds by Angela Voras-Hills

Posted on April 10, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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I love poetry that seems to contain living slices of the life of a writer. Angela Voras-Hills’s Louder Birds is the kind of collection made up of tiny portals that take you places, showing you what Voras-Hills has seen, done, and felt. At once heartfelt and elegant, the writing in this collection isn’t afraid to be straightforward, which allows it to feel real:

“Days after my mom finishes radiation, she’s in Vegas

on a Harley. It’s 80 degrees, and she sends selfies

with cocktails in the sun.”

Sometimes a poetry collection will demand deconstruction in order to be enjoyed. That’s not the case here. Many of the poems here feel like short stories that bring to life a specific time, place, or individual(s). A grandpa lands a place on a lake. Someone uses a book to smash a centipede. The poet looks through a window at a bloodstain on the floor of an abandoned house. “Two foxes run circles/around the cement wall/of a reflecting pool.” These poems are small tales that are large in significance. The beauty of great poetry is that, much like a photograph, it can capture a moment in time and hold it there forever, a thing trapped in amber that can be shared with the world. Voras-Hills has a knack for trapping moments with words, and her talent is in full display here.

Louder Birds inhabits an interstitial space between the inner an outer worlds of the writer. The inner one drives the memories and forms the frames of each poem. The outer world provides a plethora of elements of cohesion, including water, snow, wood, trees, grass, flowers, and a collection of animals that includes bears, chipmunks, foxes, eels, worms, ants, an owl, a spider, and a decapitated rabbit:

“On the bike path, a bunny’s body and blood

where the head should be. Something

has torn off its foot, something has eaten

its heart, its entrails frozen in snow.”

Voras-Hills is aware of her body as part of this world, and her writing reminds us to pay attention, to live in the moment, to rejoice, to observe the small things and rejoice in their secret meaning. The poems in Louder Birds are beautiful chronicles that invite readers to recognize the transcendence of the commonplace. That alone should make you read it.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Ghost Face by Greg Santos

Posted on April 9, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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More than a poetry collection, Greg Santos’s Ghost Face is a written exploration of identity filtered through the memories of a fragmented past. In these poems, Santos explores his roots, digging around in the dirt with his bare hands to uncover his adoption, his ties to Cambodia, his heritage, and the way his childhood experiences shaped him. “I don’t want to forget,” states Santos in a poem titled “Forgetfulness,” and remembering, holding on to memories and passing them on, is a recurring theme in this collection. In a way, Santos wants to give his children the gift of knowing what came before, but he also wants to carry those memories inside himself and use them to avoid becoming a ghost, a thought that comes from one of the lessons his father taught him before passing away:

“You remember how he always said elephants never forget.?

You remember wishing you could transform yourself into an elephant.”

Ghost Face is a collection that embraces plurality and shows the beauty that lives in it. Santos’s writing exists within the frame of his life, the places, people, animals, and music that marked him. It is also about fatherhood, writing, and the lingering scars of the Khmer Rouge regime. His searching for meaning and his obsession with holding on translate into poems about the immense significance of tiny things. Yes, there is darkness here, buy there is also humor and joy. Santos faces death, but sees it as tiny in comparison to hearing his children laugh. That balance between sadness and beauty permeates the collection.

Despite tackling so many themes, Ghost Face is mainly about identity, about being. In “Cambodian,” Santos explores the interstitial, often confusing space inhabited by those who swim between cultures, by those with deep roots elsewhere who are now far from those roots but in a place that feels like home:

“Are you Cambodian?

So, were you born in Cambodia then?

Have you ever even been to Cambodia?

Then how can you consider yourself Cambodian?

How do you mean?

Most folks think you’re Filipino. Remember when someone put you on a Twitter-thread for Filipino writers?

How did that make you feel?

?It’s the last name. Santos throws them off.?

SANTOS. It’s Portuguese, right??

Honestly, this is confusing…?

It’s like you are actually Cambodian or something…”

While there is nothing in terms of voice or style that resembles his work, some of the poems in Ghost Face reminded me of why I love the poetry of Langston Hughes so much. Like Hughes, Santos seems to be holding everything he loves in his hands while writing: his children, his parents, his childhood. He is in touch with the things that live in his heart, and has no problem sharing them with us.

Ultimately, the best thing about this book is that it reminds us that we can talk to ghosts through writing and reading. Words can hold the past and carry it into the future; they can dig into our history and heritage as they forge new memories and allow us to share them with others. More than a poetry collection, Ghost Face is Santos sharing pieces of his life with us, and what he has to share is worthy of your time and attention.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat by Khalisa Rae

Posted on April 8, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is like a newborn scream that’s been held in for eons. Sharp, strong, unapologetic, beautiful, and angry, the writing in this collection is a celebration of language and rhythm, and the words on the page run like the blood from a wound caused by racism. Rae tackles bigotry, dismantles the innate inequalities of the American Dream, takes the South to task for its history, puts a spotlight on microagressions, and screams in righteous indignation. Then…well, then the first poem is over. Sounds like too much, I know, but that’s exactly what she does. Here, as proof, is the opening of the poem that titles the collection, “Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat”:

The South will birth a new kind

of haunting in your black girl-ness,

your black woman-ness becomes

a poached confection—honeyed enigma?

pledging to be allegiant. The muddied silk robe

waving in their amber grains of bigotry. Your skin—

a rhetorical question, bloodstained equation?

no one wants to answer. You will be the umber,

tawny, terracotta tongue spattered on their American

flag, beautiful brown-spangled anthem. You will be

the bended knee in the boot of their American

Dream, and they will stitch your mouth the color

of patriarchy, call it black girl magic when you rip

the seams. Southern Belle is just another way to say:

stayed in her place on the right side of the pedestal.

As a person of color, I’ve always been wary of the “I don’t see color” crowd because hearing I don’t see color strikes me not as an anti-racist sentiment but more as a denial of racism, like it’s a problem we no longer have to fight against because whoever uttered those words is better than that. It’s also a line that more or less translates to “I don’t see color…so I don’t see the bigotry, the history, the fear, the injustice, or the systemic racism.” Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is the opposite of that phrase, and it is ware of that phrase. In fact, Rae has a line that embodies everything I’ve said so far: “Saying: I don’t see color means, I don’t see you.” The poems here are a hand that comes up to teach a lesson to a hand that moves toward a Black woman’s hair while a voice says “I love your hair! Can I touch it?” This collection is rooted in the Black experience, in the realities, history, beauty, and fears of the Black female body. Take the first of the dozen entries that make up “Guidebook for Those Considering the South Home”:

Long back roads?

still rattle me.

Make me fear being asked to step out—?

the night stick, the gun. Body turned to roadkill,

left on the curb. Forgotten.

No poet exists in vacuum, but writing poetry that is at once personal and universal is no easy task. Rae does that here, and the result is a book that demands to be read with clenched fists and an open heart. Rae is at the center of most of the writing here, but she has deep roots that dig into the country’s past, that dig into slavery as well as more recent events that showcase the disparities that still lie at the core of our society like cancerous tumors. The poems here speak of Rae, but they also speak of experiences that many gave faced as children, in college, and as adult women. They’re also poems that jump between history and the present to decry contemporary issues with deep historical roots:

“………..Why you keep stealing?

our blues and calling it a pop song?

Convincing the masses you made our pain

fashion statements. Our twerk be copywritten,

you get no royalties from our two-step.?

Our lingo isn’t for sale, so stop plagiarizing

our hood-speech, mainstreaming our “broken”

English. This America be mass producer

of appropriation, factory full of our features, ripping

our packages open searching for damaged goods.

This black be authentic. This black be original.?

This melanated music be off-market.

This slang be sold out and never returning to shelves.

This dialect be discontinued, this black too high.

Out of reach.”

Of children, Rae says “They will never know where they’re headed/until they see all the immaculate places/they’ve come from.” This line is an invitation to share history, to use the past as a way to build a better future while never losing sight of what came before in order to never again make the same mistakes. In that regard, this collection is not just one all fans of poetry should read; it’s one we should be assigning in schools.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Saturday Night Sage by Noah C. Lekas

Posted on April 7, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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There are rare poetry collections that make me feel like the beat aesthetic never went away but instead crawled into a corner in a dark bar and somehow refined itself into something new, something as spiritual and strange as the original incarnation but shorter, sharper, and tied to contemporary America in ways that cut to the heart of what the country is and has suffered. Noah C. Lekas’s Saturday Night Sage is one of those collections, and that becomes obvious from the start:

“I awoke to a bar tab

& prayer beads,

I believe, I believe,

I’ve been redeemed!

“Bodhi!” I cried,

in the slums

of the shadow factory.

“Brahmajyoti.” I prophesied,

into a broken toilet

on Main St.

on Mayday in Milwaukee

rejoicing with devotees,

on the 4th of July in Brooklyn

drinking Jameson with karmis.”

As the title implies, this is a collection about the good, the bad, the ugly, and the spiritual that can be found “in the bowels of Saturday night.” This is a book about booze and hobos, smoky bars and drug dealers, mythology and cigarettes, jazz and the blues. Lekas is a chronicler of urban nights, and he perfectly nails the atmosphere that usually accompanies the themes, places, and people he writes about.

The beauty of Saturday Night Sage is that it feels fresh, not like a Tom Waits/Charles Bukowski pastiche, which is often the case with poetry that deals with the drunk, the broken, the downtrodden. The voice here often sounds like a song, a dark blues you can easily imagine coming from a stage that holds only one person, a chair, a guitar, and a microphone. Lekas understands how rhythm affects the way a poem is read, and he uses both language, line cutes, and space on the page to dictate a variety of rhythms that make his lines hit harder.

Saturday Night Sage occupies an interstitial space between a place we’ve all been in—a place where we dread and crave the end of the night—and a space in which we can openly discuss the darkness at the core of Americana, the sadness of drunken souls stumbling through the night in search of something they can’t remember or trying to run away from something that’s inside them. There are no throwaway poems here, but of the crowning jewels of the collection is “Midwestern,” which is beautiful in its gritty reality and speaks of a seemingly irreversible process that has affected many cities across the country:

“The Wisconsin of my youth was stranded
somewhere between the collapse
of the industrial revolution
& the crack epidemic.
The Wisconsin of my adulthood is lost
somewhere between the promise of restoration
& the stoic acceptance of absolute abandonment.
I, like most of the men in my family
punched a cold steel time clock
& I swept floors
cleared dishes
cleaned cars
emptied trashcans
painted houses
demolished bathrooms

installed cabinets
remodeled kitchens
built crates
& repaired instruments.

I watched the disintegration
of a hard blue American backbone
& the rising tide of an industry-less land,
industriously destitute
the streets of my hometown
are lined with empty buildings.
The malls offer absurd free rent signing deals
to new retailers
& the factories just buckle
under the weight of it all.”

Saturday Night Sage is short and powerful. It’s the literary equivalent of a thick cloud of smoke rising through stale air in front of a neon sign. Lekas has experienced Saturday night, has spoken to those who make it their home, and he takes readers into that world with ease. You should grab a drink and join him.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Waterbaby by Nikki Wallschlaeger

Posted on April 6, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Waterbaby is a tender, angry song for a broken world. However, it’s not the kind of song meant to heal; it exposes the truth, screams against injustice, shows lives full of bad moments and “working shit jobs,” and, ultimately, offers guidance to navigate the whole mess:

“Perhaps it’s best not to trust

the politics of people who

haven’t washed their own

dishes in twenty years.”

Waterbaby, Wallschlaeger’s third collection, is about being a Black woman in contemporary America, but it’s about much more. The poems here deal with everyday life, motherhood, family, and suffering. The body is always present. So is the passage of time and the realities that make life hard. Wallschlaeger tackles everything from her point of view, but most of the resulting poetry feels universal. Her thoughts and feelings belong to her, but some of those feelings will make readers nod their head in quiet agreement:

“Why do I feel so old

when I look so young

Have a night of ok fun

& feel better & younger

refreshed, maybe lovelier

but in the morning

I feel just as old again.”

The conversations Wallschlaeger has in this collection are simultaneously with herself, with everyone else, and even with some dead poets like William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, and Willian Carlos Williams. In each poem—and they vary greatly in terms of voice, rhythm, and length—Wallschlaeger gets to the core of what she wants to say without mincing words. Her approach is to slice to the heart, and it’s something that will leave a mark on readers, as there are lines here that punch with the power of truths many would rather not discuss in public:

“Plantations are prisons & prisons produce plantations,

how our runaway slave feet gotta close-read the rides.”

Another great example is this crushing line from “American Children,” which is a gem:

“I’m not sure the children understand what heroism could be, except that it involves weapons and blood on the ground and sacrifice.”

“I’m the Black girl dozing with bleary/commuters on the Route 12 bus,” says Wallschlaeger, and while that might be true, she is much more here; a keen observer, a voice of truth, an astute chronicler. Waterbaby is beautiful in its musicality and Wallschlaeger has a vibrant rhythm that carries through in every poem, but this is a book that cuts deep into that amalgamation of beauty and horror we call America. This book claims the poet would come back from the dead to celebrate the end of capitalism. This book discusses the expectations women have to deal with. This book talks openly about doing the work but being tired of it. This book mentions guns as the everyday reality they are and shows the wounds of the “last four years of spiraling national leadership.”

There is a difference between angry poetry, which can come from anything and everything, and the kind of righteous dissatisfaction and indignation that holds Waterbaby together. This song isn’t just a healing song; this is the song we should play as we march into battle against racism and as we imagine the party we’d have after the death of capitalism. Read this celebration of language and then join me in eagerly awaiting Wallschlaeger’s next collection.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] My Dreadful Darling by Shannon Kirk

Posted on April 5, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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As a musician, I’ve heard others discuss how those who don’t normally play percussion are often good at it because they go with what feels and sounds right and are not distracted by rules and regulations. Reading Shannon Kirk’s My Dreadful Darling made me think of that. Kirk is an accomplished writer, but she’s a novelist with a knack for creepy, dark, eloquent thrillers, not a poet. However, she writes poetry, which makes her a poet, and this collection proves it. In the introduction to this book, she talks about writing poetry as a little girl and then hiding or destroying it and how that practice followed her into adulthood. Then came the pandemic, and with it came this exercise, which morphed into a wonderful book.

“In these pages, I’ve compiled poems, thoughts, letters, and questions I’ve plucked from my published novels, from works in progress, from drafts of manuscripts that changed in the course of editing, my journals, and from fragments of bits I’ve generated over many years,” states Kirk in her introduction. In other word, this is a collection built from fragments, notes, thought, and words from other books. That said, it all fits together well because different kind of love and death are cohesive elements that make this feel interconnected.

The beauty of My Dreadful Darling is how it seems like a collection of things found in other places, meant for other books, but then it turns into something unified in which the voice carries through while wearing different masks. Love, for example, is present in many of the poems, but it’s love that goes from that of a mother to a lover, from unrequited to explosive, from painful to playful. Kirk writes about going and staying, about inhabit the places where things are wrong but where we hover above moment and do nothing to put an end to it, to move to a safer place. She also writes about the spaces where love lives all by itself, drowning in memories or anger or distance:

“Of the thousand things

I passed today, none were themselves

All were you

Of the thousand sounds

An hour ago, none were anything

But your voice

In this city, from the country, to the other sea

Where you live

Is there anything other than you?

Your breath?

Am I to encounter anything at all

But you?”

Yes, love, ghosts, lists, memories; they are all pieces of things we collect to form a life, and Kirk collects them here to show us a variety of lives, to open the door to her story and to other stories she has created. The result is a collection with superb rhythm that dances between the anger of a scorned lover unsatisfied with what she has to the mellowness and warmth of a day spent enjoying an unstructured existence in which looking at the clock isn’t necessary:

“We’ve gone to the other extreme now

Poking sticks in ponds to watch ripples

Biding time, watching clouds, doing nothing

But we are happy, listless with schedules scattered

This life unstructured tic toes in time we threw away”

Some of the poems in My Dreadful Darling have notes that inform readers of where they come from or what work in progress they belong to, but these notes are ultimately irrelevant because Kirk’s natural talent for rhythm overpowers everything. The notes and the introduction let the reader know this is a Frankenstein’s monster of poetry, but the sum of its parts makes its fragmented nature irrelevant. Take the last lines of “Lisa’s Preference for Painting,” which come from Kirk’s novel Viebury Grove but stand as a testament to her cadence:

“Painting exercises muscle control, vision acuity,

requires knowledge of pigment and chemistry,

measurements and scaling, study of anatomy, and

honing of sight for depth control. Painting requires

mental and physical strength. Love brings weakness.”

My Dreadful Darling is a good thing born of a bad time. Kirk used the time the pandemic forced her to stay locked in to dig through her words and put this together. However, more than an engaging experiment, it turned into a collection of poems that revealed another talent. I hope we never go through a pandemic again, but I hope something else forces Kirk to mine her past, present, and future works again so that isn’t her last book of poems.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] at first & then by Danielle Rose

Posted on April 4, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Danielle Rose’s at first & then opens with a few lines from LIFE published in 1947. A couple of lines into the poem that stars under those lines, Rose pulls that suicide and her own life together, weaving a narrative across time in the way only poetry can:

“like me she wanted to disappear?

i have too many of my mother’s tendencies?

perhaps she nervously tapped her foot?

was no fun at parties and did not understand?

that she was not actually broken”

The dark, enigmatic aura of that opening poem is perfectly matched by the following one, which is titled “aleister crowley summoned demons & all i get is this tarot telling me i am always in the wrong.” Despite the humorous title, the poem isn’t funny and once again mentions Rose’s mother. Just like in these two poems, darkness, death, and the self quickly emerge as strong cohesive elements in the collection, and the resulting poetry is often sharp and memorable because it reveals the poet as the shifting, complex center of everything.

at first & then, which won the Fall 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition, deals with trauma, grief, and gender, but always through Rose’s lens, which makes everything feel like a study in identity and a personal confession. The body is present here, a flawed, wonderful thing full of bones, secrets, and desires:

“tell me i am like the sky / & lie to me / tell me i am expansive & clear / i need to hear that joyful clouds reach their hands into my chest / because i can feel them inside of me / storming / telling me i am pretty when i smile / i want to be a set of cascading conditions / like a logical proof or the way i am always sneaking away from my fear / tell me i am prettier when i smile / tell me / become a cloud & tell me that when i am pretty / it is impossible to be so empty”

This chapbook is a tiny gem in which the heavy themes of some of the poems balance perfectly with the wit and humor of some of the titles. For example, “on walking outside with my morning coffee at 9:00 am to find my new neighbors fucking like cottontails in their backyard” is a title that’s hard to forget. The same goes for the poem itself, in which Rose dreams of catching said neighbors in a jar and keeping the there so they can do their thing “against a snapped twig.”

In many ways, at first & then is a journey of transformation, but one that follows no map. Here, grief, trauma, and keen observations reveal the change, but the change itself, while always at the core, never overpowers anything else. These are poems about transformation, becoming, and emergence, but they don’t tackle those subjects in any cliché ways. Instead, each line holds something new, and sometimes that new thing is a powerful revelation: “i am a queer body that was hidden inside a different queer body.” These lines, more then words on the page, feel like the extricated veins of a person who performed poetry surgery on themselves.

Rose’s knack for dictating rhythm and the depth of her writing make at first & then an impressive debut, and hopefully one that announces the arrival of a great new poetic voice with much more to say.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] A Complex Accident of Life by Jessica McHugh

Posted on April 3, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Jessica McHugh’s A Complex Accident of Life is complex, but it’s no accident. Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, McHugh created a series of Gothic blackout poems. However, the book includes a “clean” version of each poem as well as images of the original pages she used, which clearly show the markings, ink, colors, and different approaches. The juxtaposition is visually engaging and reveals the artist at work. The result is a collection of short poems about a plethora of topics that quickly reveals itself as an objet d’art.

The interesting thing about having images of the original pages next to the end result of McHugh’s work is that readers get to see the words as they originally appeared in Shelley’s work and then can read the hidden poetry McHugh revealed by slicing away the “extra” words that were hiding it. This way, a page of Shelley’s work transforms into something new that carries a its own meaning:

“I am a vessel of dauntless courage

And severe evil.?

My joy will endeavor,?

My rage possess.”

According to the author’s note that kicks off the collection, McHugh originally made a few blackout poems to give away or sell. This means that, more than blackout, the pages she worked on were carefully colored and drawn on to reveal the poem within. In A Complex Accident of Life, there is plenty or color, patterns, curlicues, and drawings that go from smooth and organic (like the one for A Blessed House, which resembled a close-up of a cluster of colorful cells) to blocky blackout (although the color used to cover text is never black) with words trapped in tiny rectangles. From time to time, the blackout process is so clearly a work or art that it presents readers with a recognizable image. For example, “A Kind of Pleasure” shows a raging storm at sea, complete with dark clouds, roiling waves, and lightning bolts in the sky.

Perhaps the best thing about blackout poetry is the way it reveals not only a secret that was always on that page but also the personality and taste of the poet plucking out those special words. Reading the poems in A Complex Accident of Life isn’t reading chunks of Shelley’s work; it’s reading McHugh’s voice. “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishments of my toils,” writes Shelley. Here, dreary, night, and toils could offer an easy start, but McHugh picked November, and the result is a poem that shares the collection’s title and perfectly exemplifies how the poet’s voice is at the center here, even if the source material is Shelley’s work:

“November was half-extinguished,

A dull yellow eye?

Within I endeavoured to form,

Beautiful and horrid,

A complex accident of life.”

Themes abound in this collection, but they all carry the dark, gloomy atmosphere of Gothic literature. Darkness, wounds, monsters, and “quiet misery” can be found in this pages, but the poems are so short that recurring themes never get boring. McHugh received a Bram Stoker Award nomination for this collection, and it’s easy to see why: A Complex Accident of Life is a monster born of the pieces of another monster, all carefully rearranged and brought to life by McHugh. I hope she tackles another classic soon.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.