[REVIEW] Book of Levitations by Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion

Posted on April 28, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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] The Bench by Cassondra Windwalker

Posted on April 25, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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 Some Happenstance by Dominic Albanese

Posted on April 24, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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“these poems are letters

addressed to whom it may concern

general statements about life

the hereafter

the things that puzzle me

feelings I have

and can’t talk about

not from shame

but from ignorance

or unwillingness”

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.

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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] Witch by Philip Matthews

Posted on April 22, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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] Green by Melissa Fite Johnson

Posted on April 20, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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] Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia

Posted on April 19, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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] To Emit Teal by upfromsumdirt

Posted on April 17, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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] Love & Metaxa by Christina Strigas

Posted on April 16, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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] All the Violent Memories by J.B. Stevens

Posted on April 15, 2021 by admin

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

“I hope I don’t catch one,

But I know I’m due.

I know I’m due.”

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.

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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] And God Created Women by Connie Voisine

Posted on April 14, 2021 by admin

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.