Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion’s Book of Levitations is a rare book that delivers on the promises made in the title but also delivers much more. This is a book about spells, ghosts, curses, and even instructions on how to make a voodoo doll, how to resurrect a dissected animal, or how to become a she wolf (“Remember,/you were born howling/with blood on your jowls”).
There is a lot of
significance in this collection and the atmosphere the poems create is at once
absorbing, mysterious, and enjoyable. There is an enigmatic energy at play
here, along with an underlying feminist discourse that jumps off the page from
time to time (Praise the girl that learns sewing/to
stitch herself back up”). However, the best element in
Book of Levitations is that it’s easy to read and—and this is rare for poetry
that deals with dark topics even in passing—it’s a lot of fun. Here’s “Spell for New Homes”:
“Sage, holy water, black salt—
stack these in corners, smear
them in new rooms. Tie down
letters and spoons (from people
you can’t miss back)—they
levitate on full moons.
Tell all insides of cabinets
something good, bright.
Hang one plant in each room
to clean the air.
Don’t let in guests with mud
on their shadows.”
The poems in this book often read like
rituals or invitations. They may or may not offer solutions, but at the core of
each of them are words that deliver a strong message, once that’s loud and
clear if you’re willing to listen. Sadre-Orafai
and Champion have a knack for economy of language, and they ensure that they
pack as much meaning as possible into each poem in Book of Levitations, none of which is longer than a page.
There are
some elements of cohesions that give this collection a tremendous sense of
unity. The titles are the first and most obvious one as many of them contain
the word “spell.” However, as you read, things like water and death weave in
and out of the collection. The same goes with you. Yes, there is a constant
shattering of the fourth wall here. These poems are for readers; they’re for
you. Some apply only to women, but others are clearly for everyone who reads
them. Addressing the reader, adding that you to the poems, makes them much more
personal. Yes, these poems are great and fun to read, but something about
Sadre-Orafai and Champion talking directly to you makes them linger after
turning the last page. In any case, don’t take my word for it; here’s “Spell to
Stop Harassment”:
“When he tells you to smile, baby,?
do it, but make sure it cocks like a
gun.
Make wind chimes of kitchen knives
and hang them in every doorway.
Find your sachet of baby teeth,
bury them in your cervix, and wait
for them to take root.
When you have a shiny row
of vagina fangs, fling your legs?
open like an umbrella in a thunderstorm.”
We all need a little magic in our
lives, and Sadre-Orafai and Champion
deliver plenty of it here. Read it.
—
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.
A bench is a place to rest or a chapel or a home or a stage. That said, we often don’t notice because when things are normal, a bench is often just a bench. The pandemic changed that just like it changed most interactions. In Cassondra Windwalker’s The Bench, which won the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest, a bench is a stage in which we see the world, the people that inhabit it, and the new reality they inhabit.
Pandemic poetry. We knew it was coming, but we probably didn’t expect it to be as full of light and keen observations as Windwalker’s collection is. From the start, The Bench is an invitation to sit down, pay attention, and soak in the stories we’re about to witness:
“what
does a bench say
?but I know you are tired, I know
you are weak,?
rest with me.?
this testament to frailty became a
repository of strength
in the stories lived and breathed and
told?
on its sagging seat and iron arms.?
sit here and listen.?
take the stories with you when you go.”
Some of the poems here are dark.
There’s death and a nursing home, people walking with empty souls and bad
thoughts. However, there is also a strange light here. Windwalker is a superb
chronicler of everyday humanity, and in the short book we see how human
resilience shines, how we push through even when we have no guarantee that the
outcome will be positive. Luckily, sometimes that outcome is indeed positive,
and when that happens, the universe gives us one more reason to keep trying.
For example, two women sit on a bench in “small
talk,” and their silent, brief meeting has an effect on them:
“a month ago, they’d have never
acknowledged
each other, but now?
they cling to the trappings of
society.?
days spent behind doors, behind walls,
have made this brief intersection?
an oasis. the old woman clutches her
prescription
and rises, reluctant to abort this
connection.?
she waves good-bye as if they were old
friends
now, as if this moment mattered.
the woman in the sugar skull mask goes
home
to her empty apartment and does not
kill herself.”
These are poems where masks and social
distancing make appearances, but they have stories at their core, and the
humanity they communicate isn’t dampened or diminished by the awful pandemic
that frames the writing and some of the timely topics it tackles (“cops keep
killing black people, brown people”). Windwalker has trapped the atmosphere of
the early stages of the pandemic perfectly, and her words resonate with what
the situation has done to many as people are “urgent and fearful and anguished/as
they press to their task and then scurry/back to safety.”
The Bench is full of humanity. It is a
dark, heartfelt reminder of a time that’s still here, and it demands to be read
because I reminds us that, no matter what, we keep going.
—
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.
Those lines, which
appear in the second poem of the book, serve as a perfect introduction to
Dominic Albanese’s By Some Happenstance.
Simple, straightforward, and heartfelt, Albanese’s work does away with any
pretentiousness and instead focuses on trying to communicate complicated
feelings and thoughts in the easiest way possible. The result is a collection
that speaks from the heart directly into your heart.
Albanese’s life beats
at the core of his poems. He writes about heartbreak, the memories of the women
in his life, fishing, and fixing cars at a garage. He shares flashes of cities
he’s visited and thing’s he has done. He talks about what hurts him and how
“these words offer the medication/my soul needs to say what I mean.” Luckily
for readers, he’s great at saying exactly what he means:
“the sameness of the
days
is begging to wear on
me
like old shoes, too
long kept”
There are two things
here that go above and beyond what Albanese puts on the page. The first is an
inescapable nostalgia. When Albanese writes abut the river or New York or San
Francisco, we feel his need to be there, the way those places and the events
that happened there touched him. The second element is darkness. This is a
collection about many things, and some of those things include death, living
paycheck-to-paycheck, memories of Vietnam, broken relationships, and bad
nights. Albanese tackles both things with the same candor, and that makes By Some Happenstance feel more like
listening to an old friend that reading a poetry collection.
I first read Albanese’s poetry a few years ago when I read his collection of Vietnam poems Bastards had the Whole Hill Mined. His work stuck with me because it was gritty and brutally honest. It also seemed to be aware of how close we are to death. There is a bit of that here as well, and Albanese—now in his 70s—writes of what’s ahead while also talking about everything that came before, the things he loved, and the bad choices he made.
By
Some Happenstance is
part biography and part collection of vignettes dressed up as poetry. The
economy of language here shows that Albanese cares about communicating
effectively and getting as much as he can into a small a space as possible.
This is a collection once can easily read in one sitting, but the heart of the
poems will stick with readers for a long time after they turn the last page.
—
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.
What’s not in a scent? Fragrance? Perfume? Smells? Or the human condition itself? Elizabeth Powell’s brave new olfactory dispenser of poetry, Atomizer, suggests that what’s not in a scent is a knowledge we are not privy too, despite all our claims to ideation, reason, symbolization and transcendence. We are, instead, beings lashed to immanence, as in the ‘odor,’ as in knowing love is not just knowing the idea and word ‘love,’ but the thing—love— itself. You find out what Galbanum means and does. Through the senses.
It’s
easy to fall instantly in addiction with the conceit of Powell’s poems when she
writes, “Indeed, our desire to smell
pleasant things is from our lost garden” (4). How can a poet go wrong after
such an invocation of Eden as the touchstone of all that is valued and always,
forever, lost? Extending the lapsarian conceit, misogyny does smell of lily of
the valley (4), or whatever tropical fruit of flower might be at hand depending
on where the valley is. The associative quality of words that Powell’s work relies on, of which syntactic and
semantic reason know nothing, repeatedly beg this one question: how can a scent
not be perfumed with desire? (19). Moreover, agonistically, the poetic
qualities of conjuncture and disjuncture, dissociations, images harboring and
hinting at sensibilities—“instamatic photos of oceans I was not invited to”—(19)
make instant sense because, of course, all our girlhoods have lighted knowing girls the way to dusty
womanliness. Young bones litter the ocean floor. Reading these poems is like
reading the retrospective journals of an old girlfriend, or prophetic letters
from their future.
Powell’s
poetry works on so many different levels—sensorial, intellectual,
psychological, associative, dissociative, feminist, post-feminist, passional,
intersubjective, intergenerational and trans-species—but the most intense
effect it has is that of poetry in the best sense of unrhymed, unrestrained
exclamations and ejaculations that form the ‘base notes’ (4) of ‘love.’ When
the poems stop referencing olfaction repeatedly or exclusively as in the
section Top Notes, they connect to
the Atomizer prologue through the
theme of rage (as frustrated love) at the Lesbian Mother emerging powerfully, insistently, as in the poem
titled “Escape”: “How can I make this be a feminist text?/ The oppressed
Lesbian Mother should be the hero” (21). There is also ongoing iconoclasm
beyond the rejection of the Lesbian Mother in rejecting old white men’s modes
of entry into the world of the imagination and the fantastic, as in the reference
to The Lion and the Wardrobe on p. 18.
But
the ends are linked, the circle is rounded, with the exile from the Lesbian Mother’s
household to that of the (presumably straight?) grandmother in whose farm lived
“the old cow/Alice, on the urine-soaked hay that gave me a love/For ruinous
colognes. For a pillow, Alice’s mighty belly/Where I’d listen to the wisdom of
her sacred gurgles/During the milking hour at twilight, the time/Mother’s
girlfriend called L’Heure Bleue”
(21). And out of the abandonment by Lesbian Mothers that literally results in
imprisonment via literal closeting of the young daughter at other times in an
impossible urban space with younger siblings—a frightening, un-Edenic, small
space—some of the most vivid and terrifying language about distillation, about
being bottled like a captured scent, occurs only by fantasies of escape and
return to the sheltering grandmother’s dairy farm:
“.
. . . I was here, out on good behavior
To
this place my mother hated. Heifers jailed in a pen.
Later,
she got another place in the city with her secret wife,
Left
us sixty miles away in the old closet. I was in charge,
Used
laundry quarters for candy bars for dinner.
She’d
come back Tuesday/Thursday nights,
Take
us for pizzaburgers. The silence was the gag rule,
For
which there was no Heimlich.
She
was just mother’s friend.
In
an escape room you have to figure out
What
in the room is a clue. In college, we talked
for
days about Jane Eyre and attics. We played “Clue”
In
a lounge with windows. I know how the need
To
solve for X starts to influence how you perceive
Reality
and the resulting adrenaline can be fabulous.
Why
look for places to escape from? The room is not
A
puzzle, it is a container for the puzzle. Back at the closet,
I
was a glass bottle of distilled silence
In
an ornate box made of Lavender Scare. My mother
And
her girlfriend never abandoned their city apartment
Until
they were carried out on long white stretchers
Where
their bodies continued to hold that silence
Like
a library. And after a long time, I saw free children
In
the park playing with their two mothers, marching in freedom
Parades,
and I cried. And the vacuumed silence in my head popped.
And
one day a window in my heart opened, and I crawled out” (21-22).
Easily
some of the richest, explosive, irradiated language about mis-parenting that
can be imagined, this is also Powell’s haunting stare at the bomb-blasted
ground of womanhood and motherhood as a noxious container, an atomizer, within patriarchy.
That container gives off the stench of abuse stored in smaller containers like the
‘Matryoshka girl daemon’ (2) layered within it and called patriarchy, mother, closet,
daughter, heifer, haystack, grass, and lastly the essential hidden and minute
flower or herb in nature that, distilled and atomized, stands olfactory
testament to the idea of ‘essence’ as often manipulated, boxed in, tactically
and unscrupulously ‘dispensed,’ as perhaps in a certain narrative of feminist
liberation long hailed as the best kind.
Being haunted by boxes and closets—little
spaces—continues into “E.Diptych,” where men and potential ‘matches” live in
“little” or “Magical” boxes (24), the box reference being, of course, to
digital social interfaces like computer and phone screens, but also to the haunting
states of isolation in apparent connectivity the ‘social’ interfaces are known
to inspire: feelings of being ‘boxed in,’ ‘closeted,’ and ‘distilled’ to an
unbearable yet unavoidable nostalgic memory of immediacy as ‘Olfaction’ (2), so
phonetically akin to ‘old-fashioned’! The news out of televisions—boxes—sickens
and haunts too: “The television is a liquor cabinet to which we will retreat/
after dinner. Change the channel, change your liquor:/ beer before liquor never
sicker” (26). And the tyranny of ‘The TV’ is almost as bad as the tyranny of
the Lesbian mother who just wants, needs, away, away, away (“The Box”). Indeed,
“The Box” is dedicated to “The TV,” which appears forty-six times over 2 pages,
not counting minor avatars, laying bare the enchantment with incantations that
keeps society and children and women from not vanishing into the TV, the Box
(and the boxes within the Box).
The images, conceits, cocktails and fusions uncontained in Powell’s Atomizer are elusive, nebulous and polymorphous—like scent, perfume, smell, odor, stench—but the overall assault of her language on the reader’s senses is to harness an arousal latent in a repressed cross-sensory spectrum revealing the world as ‘objectified’ and ‘commodified’ across a panorama and panoply of not one but many senses and sensoria, making ‘truth’ salvageable from not the triumphal achievement but the unstoppable “desire to smell pleasant things” which is “from our lost garden” (emphasis mine; 4). Though feminist and femino-centric, Powell’s poetry has transcended the boxing of words into political categories and schemas, opting instead for the explosive unmanageability, the smoky ‘perfume’ (‘second-hand smoke’ as in ‘per’ or ‘through’ and ‘fumus’ or ‘smoke’) of the human condition, and of poetry, whereby “We ingest each other through our nostrils” “86,400 times a day” (30).
—
Nandini Bhattacharya is a Writer and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her fields of expertise are South Asia Studies, Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, Women’s Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published three scholarly books on these subjects, the latest being Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). Her first novel Love’s Gardenwas published in October 2020. Shorter work has been published or will be in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021, the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), Funny Pearls, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, The Bangalore Review, PANK,and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and VONA. Her awards include first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021. She’s currently working on a scholarly monograph about how colonialism and capitalism continue to shape India’s cultural production, and a second novel titled Homeland Blues, about love, caste, colorism, and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America. She lives outside Houston. You can find her on Amazon, Twitter; Instagram, Facebook and her Blog.
It’s probably impossible to read thirty poetry collections in thirty days and not come across a variety of voices, approaches, and styles. The beauty of such an exercise is that different styles jump at you and you learn to accept them all, to navigate whatever you encounter with the same attention. I’ve been reading poetry that tells clears stories lately. You know, the kind of poetry where you can easily identify slices of the poet’s biography or know exactly who shows up in a poem as well as when and where it happened. Philip Matthews’s Witch was a departure from the realm of clarity and straightforward storytelling in verse.
Witch
pulls readers into a
world of angels, demons, shells, and strangeness. In fact, more than a poetry
collection that can be easily compared to other books, the easiest way to
“explain” this collection is to compare it to arthouse films. Just like
arthouse, we know we’re in the presence of art and enjoy the elements we’re
able to fully grasp while rolling with—and often also enjoying—that which is
beyond immediate comprehension. Sure, we know there’s a woman in many poems
here names Petal and we know there is love, fatherhood, water, transformation,
and pain in these poems. We also read lines like “I rinse her cock
with/abundant energy” or “we are trying/to scry out/a gender” and understand
there is a discussion of gender and queerness rippling right at the surface.
However, the rest evades us. Witch is a festival of language and meaning
waiting to be decoded. “The Five Shades in Her Neck” is a perfect example:
“Petal peels back
you.
Bell stitched to her
headskin.
Bicycle.
Chased through the
eight sun.
She freezes.
She is a strict gun.
Stunning you with her
hand.
Her hand immediately
in your hair.
Sunni red.
Tined and constellated.
The targeting wind in
her neck.”
Yes, some of the
stuff in Witch is confusing, and
that’s okay. Why is Petal 1,002 years old? What is the significance of being
married to two angels? Why do women appear as tentacled in a poem? Why is the
headless angel kneeling? Why do other angels “drift along the periphery/of
sheep”? I don’t know, but reading about them is an exercise in poetry, a way to
enter a different world and encounter words strung together in ways you’ve
never encountered them before. This is one of the beautiful things poetry can
offer, and it’s what the core of Witch is
made of.
—
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.
Melissa Fite Johnson’s Green is a box of memories that also contains a few bridges. Yes, I said bridges. The first one is between now and whenever the things she talks about—the death of her father, her running away at five years old, breaking her leg, a trip to the fertility clinic—happened. The second is between poetry and music. These are poems that have a unique rhythm, and undeniable musicality, but I mean more than that; these are poems that have open conversations with songs, most of which readers will know. The last bridge is between reality and the world Johnson’s filter creates. She was once sixteen, but she can be sixteen again here as she visits her past self or she can bring her father to the page despite the fact that he passed away in 1998. Every one of these bridges is worth crossing.
Poetry that tells
stories has always been my favorite kind, and Green is full of stories. Some
have a hint of comedy, some are memories shaped into poetry by words, and some
are slices of Johnson’s biography presented without filter. Every line about
her father, for example, cuts you to the marrow. “The Immediacy” is a perfect
example:
Once my father wanted yogurt?
but couldn’t remember the word.?
Once he tried to carry his own cereal,
brace the bowl’s lip against his cane
handle,
and my mother came home to flakes
crusted to the kitchen floor. When he
mouthed Elden again and again, I
guessed
my brother had a new girlfriend, Ellen,
but
it was the name of his dead uncle.?
So what? I
asked, then left the room.
The day my father died,?
I smelled the cologne-tinged?
rubber handle of his cane, held it
tight
in my hand, pretended it was his hand.
The say geniuses are those who can explain something
complicated in a way that it’s easy to understand. The poetic version of that
probably has to do with a poet’s ability to bring something to the page in a
way that you understand it, but only the best of them can me you both
understand and feel. Johnson belongs to this second group. There are poems here
so full of emotion that they stick with you even after you’re done reading.
There’s sadness and pain, but both are presented in ways that they become
palpable, capable of jumping from the page and touching you with their painful
straightforwardness. Just read “The Woman and the Wolf”:
He strangled little sounds from me
in his doorway. Later?
he called the word strangle
dramatic. You could breathe fine.
Hand over my mouth, he shushed
into my ear. Later he said,?
You can’t rape your girlfriend.?
I lay awake while he slept.
Easter morning I cried?
in church, quietly?
so my mother couldn’t hear.
Another bowed chin in a pew.
Sometimes I imagine wolves?
as wounded birds. From a distance,
they’re not so different, the howling
head, a wing puncturing the sky.
Johnson visits herself in the past and sees herself in the future. She imagines other realities while tied to this one. Throughout all of it, she chronicles, and the result of that is a fantastic collection that demands to be devoured first and then read slowly, savoring each trip in time regardless of the darkness that sometimes is waiting there.
—
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.
Benjamin Garcia’s Thrown in the Throat is one of those rare poetry collections that isn’t satisfied with tackling one important subject. Between growing up undocumented and processing the complexities of queer identity (“mom didn’t know I was gay/because she chose not to see”), this is a superb debut that explores identity in a variety of ways and heralds the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry.
Garcia does a lot of
things right, but there are three elements that merit discussion. The first is
the use of Spanish. This is a collection that brings together being and
belonging. Garcia is part Santa Muerte and part Marilyn Monroe, and the mix of
languages echoes. In these poems, the use of Spanish is deliberate, a great
reminder that sometimes usamos una palabra porque es la mejor palabra para esa
oración o sentimiento y no porque no sabemos la traducción de ella. Y que
conste: “If some words don’t belong in poems, then/I say some people can go
fuck themselves.”
The second element,
which is incredibly timely, is existence between cultures, in the interstitial
space that is home to all migrants:
When our mothers had no water for themselves?
we drank. When we had no bed we mapped a plot
in the dirt. We had to lie in the dirt of your country.
When we had no money we worked.?
When we had no license we walked.?
When we had no strength our mind kept walking.
When we had no passport our blood?
was our passport. When there was no train
we hauled the weight of our own body.
When we had no companion we remembered
God is our companion. When we had no
direction our family was our compass.
When we had no faith luck?
was our faith. When we have finished
death will be our luck.
Undocumented is our status, resistance
is our cause. Because we cannot sleep
we dream with open eyes.
Garcia explores family, poverty, love, queerness, and
trauma through language. At once playful and precise, the writing in Thrown in the Throat operates on two
levels. In the first, the words tell stories, explore memories, and chronicle
important events. In the second, language is a vehicle for rhyme and rhythm,
with cadence and alliteration popping up from time to time to remind readers
that Garcia is in control at all times and that the way they’re reading the
poem obeys the way the poet crafted it.
Of all the elements mentioned above, playfulness is
perhaps the strongest and the least expected. Garcia has a sense of humor, and
it dances with trauma and bad memories in this collection. The reader always
stands on shaky ground, expecting a reversal, an explosive line, a shattering
revelation, or a devastating truth, and Garcia constantly delivers. Here’s the
first part of “The Great Glass Closet”:
“This is not a metaphor: when I say that I lived in the
closet, it’s because I lived in the closet.
You might, too, if you shared a one-bedroom apartment
with eleven other people and a pet: mother, stepfather, brother, brother,
brother, uncle, aunt, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, dog. Then there’s me, the
surplus.
You could have called our closet a walk-in closet in the
sense that a child’s body could walk in. Mine did, and I called it home. It was
comfortable enough, if you were willing to lie. I was.”
Thrown in the Throat packs a life and unpacks an identity.
Navigating smoothly through the rocky terrain of immigration and Otherness,
Garcia’s poems are declarations that stick to your ribs and convince you that
you know the person behind the words because something so strong and personal
can’t click with you so quickly unless there is some kind of kinship. This is a
debut all poetry lovers should read, and then join in me in eagerly waiting for
whatever Garcia does next.
—
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.
Sometimes you read poetry that makes you think of a juggler throwing knives lit on fire into the night sky. You’ve seen jugglers before, but this one—the one you’re reading—is new, special, unique. Encountering poets like that means encountering not only words in orders you’ve never seen them in before but also words used to say things you’ve never heard them say before. upfromsumdirt is that kind of word magician (“i’m a shaman on the forward path/walking past-backwards to where the Ra also rises”).
I first
encountered upfromsumdirt’s word last year when I read Deifying a Total Darkness, which blew me away and struck a chord
with the Caribbean magic riding my veins. When I started putting together this
National Poetry Month project, I knew I had to reach out and include some of
his work. To Emit Teal was all I
wanted it to be and more.
You
don’t even have to go into the first poet to know you’re experiencing something
strong, something that carries a message. All you have to do is read the
dedication:
“TO
EMMETT TILL
FOR
breonna
&
ahmaud
&
george
&”
Simple, but it hurts. Three times; a history of
racism, struggle, and murder. Then you start reading, and it only gets better.
One of the things that make upfromsumdirt work unique is his balance of time
and subject. He writes about now, but with always keeps the past present. He
writes about the word, but in a way that’s filtered through his experiences and
amplified and presented by his voice. This is poetry about the self that often
is inextricably tied to the world and to other people.
Some things in this collection are easy to write
about. You already know it deals with racism and history. Yeah, slavery is in
there, and don’t you forget. There’s also a distinctive musicality and words
that create their own rhythm: “you hafta be a butterfly to feel this tango,/electric
bomba for our boneblack spirits.” Lastly, there is Blackness as upfromsumdirt
sees it in a historical context: “our
status as Nigerian bronze smith descendants/down to some ordinary yard
bird—hustlers” Lastly, there is the stuff you read and then read again because
it’s so timely (sadly) and so powerful:
“we
coddle our kids in the genie bottle’s broken shards; we caress & dress our
newborns in secondhand smoke & mirror with “make a wish” as body armor.
born as batteries—their pained laughter the lithium for the very war machine
come to kill them. for nostalgia’s sake, they’ll even kick in your door in the
dead of night and brew tea for you under a hail of bullets; the keystone cops
in a brutal ballet.”
You can
understand that without much digging, but then there are poems that seem to
bring messages that demand you dig deeper. upfromsumdirt seems to have spoken
to the Orishas and they gave him a gift: to write with words we all know but in
a way that strikes your chest like the sound of drums…and makes you understand
it beyond language. This is something he does time and again, and it’s the
reason why folks should read his work. Here’s just a taste you can feel and
could have a hard time explaining because it contains so much:
“either
way, i’m too ancestral to carry on as some
cold
canon’s common cuck—i’m an old ass man
my
knees ache from translating Earth?
to a
telling-tongue (and from too much Splenda
to let
a daughter tell it)—carrying a vesperous hurt
400
years too heavy – but walking around with your
ass on
your shoulders is a definite cause for type-2
diabetes
so i’ve backed down (somewhat) with
the
mouth-frothing diatribe—i’m a faith-healing
black
folk-art snake handler in 21st century coveralls
bidding
you to come eat my magic yeast—beneficial
poisons
to regrow lost youthhood these
mythic
words are a load-bearing wall in the Temple
of
Octavia—Patron
Lady of the Thick Black Lip
each
quip a ledger for our unborn legends and that’s
the
real reason i’ve lured you here—human sacrifices
are
needed—so surrender at once your throat to me let me
slice
out a premonition with the edge of
an
orange peel placing these long drawn out words?
on the
sleeve of a t-shirt for e-bay every sentence
a gang
sign for the Dark Gods Of Black Poetry on
pinterest—my
stories hauled in egg sacks from
the
center of the sun on the back of Anansi
i’m
here because there is splinter in America
and now
is not the time for withdrawing words
absconding
from the up-or-down vote.
You’ve
seen jugglers before, but from time to time you encounter one doing tricks
you’ve never seen before. That’s what To
Emit Teal does, and it’s what makes upfromsumdirt a poet you should read.
Leave what you think you know about poetry at the door and enter his world. You
won’t regret it.
—
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.
Starting a review with your own blurb is a weird thing to do, but here we are. I’ve been a fan of Strigas’s work for a while now, so when she asked me to read her latest and say something about it, I jumped at the opportunity to talk about her poetry outside of a review. Here’s what I said:
“Love & Metaxa is a collection of feelings violently thrown against the page. Strigas’s work is intense and honest. This collection is a mirror that reminds us of ourselves: a little dirty, a bit sad, stained with coffee, questioning everything, remembering the things that turned into scars, craving booze, ignoring the way the heart aches. These poems are the equivalent of making out with a stranger in a parking lot as wild horses stampede down the street and you feel the weight of the ghosts of old lovers hanging from your lips. Ah, but there is fun and lust, locked rooms and books, the beach and the fact that death is not yet here. Forget reading these poems; feel them. They will probably kiss you in return.”
That blurb contains no lies, but I
didn’t have enough space to say everything I wanted to say about this
collection. Enter this review.
Love
& Metaxa is a bizarre rollercoaster of emotions.
Strigas makes love in one poem and then deal with her father’s death in the
next. There are kisses and glioblastomas, a bit of music and a lot of booze, a
few ghosts and a lot of pain. In a nutshell, these poems are a collection of
feelings and experiences, all filtered through poetry, all containing a slice
of Strigas, a chunk of her life:
I slept under crumbled bridges,?
car lights reflecting pothole prisms,
when I lost my soul to the?
gods of: drugs.?
wars?
alcohol?
dead poets?
sharp philosophers?
listless writers.
Our glowing graffiti—illegal,
Polaroids, opioids?
a tower of glossy tabloids—
Past inflated—dated bottles
majestic little lanterns
erupting enlightened.
You filled in a spotlight for me,
In neon bars I slaved in,?
smoky?
local
emptied, lonely rebel—?
just another female poet, a fitted
slave
I became your Metaxa maid.
No more niceties.?
As the antihero you were made to be:
under a highway bridge?
ashamed?
stuffed inside a glass pillow, evoking
cult leaders.?
A revelation I named Vacant Lot.
The magic of Love & Metaxa resides in its balance: it’s beautiful and ugly,
painful and happy, sexy and sad. These are poems are traveling, but also about
things you want to forget and fridges full of hostility, of books but also of
loss, of city lights and naked flesh. Strigas writers with her heart on her
sleeve, and the writing here reflects that with poem after poem full of
memorable lines, pointed questions, and sharp observations. Read that blurb
again. Done? Now go get your kiss.
—
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.
J.B. Stevens is
talking about a bullet in those lines. He is talking about the certainty of
death, the fear of knowing that the more time you spend in front of heavily
armed enemies, the bigger the changes of you catching a bullet are. A bullet is
something you can touch, a tool you can use. Fear is different. Fear is
something that touches you and not the other way around. It’s something you
might try to use as a tool to stay alive, but it’s also something that can
destroy you, haunt your dreams, make you insecure. In All the Violent Memories there is a lot of fear and bullets.
However, there is hope and happy endings. This is a short poetry collection
about war that digs deeps into the trauma of it and shows that violence has a
way of hurting even those who survive.
There are times in
which poetry is used to deliver veiled messages or to explore something using
language in a way that makes it impossible to see the meaning of the work
unless the reader spends time deconstructing the poem. That’s not the case
here. Stevens writes about war as if he’s stabbing the page. In All the Violent Memories, writing is a
way to cope, an exorcism, a way to perform self-surgery and put things on the
page so that, maybe, they haunt Stevens a little less.
“Iraq took my soul,
Sleep required
medication,
Death beckons
peaceful.
Why can’t I relax,
The assholes all
fucking missed,
I endure. They
missed.
Motivation gone,
My novel consumes the
world,
The memories call.
War is at the core of
this collection. Several other elements are present, and they all come together
to give this a noir feel. Guns, drugs, violence, and even a coffee burn to the
crotch bring in a dose of gritty reality, but war and its effects are the heart
of All the Violent Memories. The
threat of death, suicide, broken relationships, loss, fear, bomb dogs,
interpreters, and bombs; they make up most of the poems here, and they make for
authentic, uncomfortable reading that everyone should experience.
All
the Violent Memories
is raw and emotionally gritty. Stevens
writes like he’s telling a story, and his clarity and straightforward approach
help these short poems deliver a harder punch. This isn’t a happy book, but
it’s an important one because it reminds us that some things aren’t over just
because they came to an end.
—
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.
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