Bull City Press Archives

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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The reasons a lot of literary critics opt not to write about poetry is that doing so is often to trying to explain the ineffable. Trying to come up with a few lines to describe Connie Voisine’s And God Created Women is like witnessing a religious ceremony from an unknown culture conducted in a language you don’t understand and then trying to explain exactly what was happening. The poems here are beautiful and Voisine is an I that keeps popping up, so at least we have some coordinates for navigation. However, besides those two things, the poems in this collection are about everyday things becoming elevated into something more via language.

And God Created Women contains known elements shaped into new things. There are babies and horses here, for example. People ride the bus and watch the news. Someone is angry and a wedding takes places after a murder. We know the world Voisine writes about, but we encounter a different version of it here. For example, we know the story of God creating Eve, but here we see it differently, and the retelling calls her womb a 3-D printer and includes Cheetos.

“Woman printed out two sons

in pain she bore them, and later,

much later, that fratricide, another

management fail. God gave her

other wonders, like the flaming

swords barring her from the garden,

a nice set of earrings, and the recent

regional victory of basketball team.

Much later, God’s son was very kind

to her, though she had slipped a bit,

what with the poverty and prostitution.

And God Created Women might be a guide to find beauty in everyday things. Or maybe it’s an exploration of how we can inhabit different spaces and how those spaces either shape us or adapt to who we are. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. The only thing that’s clear here is that Voisine is a gifted writer with a knack for unveiling things using a unique lens that reveals them as new and makes us wonder about the details we might be missing.

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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 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.

Bull City Press

[REVIEW] And God Created Women by Connie Voisine

[REVIEW] Séance in Daylight by Yuki Tanaka