Book Reviews
14 March 2024
Chris L. Butler’s Sacrilegious
Reviewed by Holly Eva Allen
If I’m being honest, I’m often drawn to poetry with religious themes. I even like poetry that doesn’t have religious themes but, rather, employs religious imagery to great effect. Maybe it’s the queer ex-Catholic religious trauma I’ve got going on. Whatever the cause, I’m always on the look out for poems and collections that really make put religious concepts and imagery to work. I’m pleased to say that Sacrilegious by Chris L. Butler is perhaps one of the best examples of such a practice that I’ve read.
Really, though, Butler’s collection can’t easily be reduced to the strength of the religious concepts used throughout the text because they appear alongside striking condemnations of nationalized and oft-excused racism. This powerful dichotomy is apparent from the very first page in the poem “School Dayz”, the first few lines of which are “People will say, “America isn’t racist.” Yet almost every/ school I’ve ever attended has had a Blackface incident./” (1) The call the poet makes, urging the reader to question the validity of an educational system and a culture in which such contemptible occurrences are commonplace, is powerful as is. However, Butler adds a layer to this discussion by calling into question the validity of specific religious institutions and practices that may excuse such behaviors: “It was as if they had an invisibility cloak woven/ specifically to mask their sins. Some of these schools/ were Catholic, which made my suffering easy to/ disregard, simply by asking Jesus for forgiveness./” (1)
While adding additional facets to a condemnation or question in a poem can sometimes overcomplicate or obfuscate things for readers, Butler’s pieces employ distinctly straight-forward language and adept transition lines to seamlessly connect associated ideas. Similar in this regard to “School Dayz” is the titular poem “Sacrilegious”:
In my eyes, Tupac’s rhymes
should be considered literary canon,
because twenty five years after his death
the lyrics still rest inside my ear drums! (7)
Here the reader is asked to consider what items might be considered “literary canon” and why. The persistently evocative quality of Tupac’s craft has continued to fascinate the poet for a quarter of a century. This alone communicates the value of something many prescriptive traditionalists might not deem of a “literary” quality. Near the close of “Sacrilegious”, Butler reinforces his critique of tradition value systems:
I must admit,
my Walkman’s influence
had me reciting the soliloquies of Shakur
more than the parables of Jesus. (7)
Just as “School Dayz” opened with a reproof of one social practice or institution (the school system) and later deepens the text with religious overtones, the addition of theological inquiry sagaciously identifies an outdated and yet often unquestioned train of reasoning. The conception that work of “literary” value is both of a certain age and also of a certain origin or medium (Shakespearean sonnets, Biblical psalms, etc.) is one rooted in multiple fallacies of logic and Anglocentric ideals. Butler challenges these fallacies directly but also via positioning and structure. The placement of both “Shakur” and “Jesus” and the very end of two successive lines implies a parity or possible equivalency between the two. The words of Jesus are lasting and valued by many, the poem acknowledges, but the work of Tupac Shakur is also lasting and of great value.
Despite these critiques, Butler does not wholly dismiss quintessentially “literary” work. “Summertime Sadness Negro Blues”, for example, is noted as being written “after Langston Hughes”. The piece makes use of rhythm and repetition in a way that is certainly reminiscent of Hughes’ work. However, Butler’s poem does not completely mirror any single Hughes piece and instead presents a specific iteration of the individual struggle serving as an example of systemic racism in the United States and Canada as a whole: “I’ve been wronged by my countrymen:/ Countrymen as in the thorn in my side,/ thorn as in the prick in my livelihood.” (17) The imagery and word choice in this specific piece is notable as words like “prick” conjure phallic or masculine concepts that, when coupled with details such as “countrymen”, criticize not only the racist hegemonic structures present in the United States and Canada, but also the patriarchal and phallocentric aspect of said structures.
While a reader taking a cursory glance at “Summertime Sadness Negro Blues” might be tempted to say that this particular poem does not feature religious themes or theological inquiries of any kind, such an assumption would be missing one of the primary arguments presented in Sacrilegious. Butler’s continued dichotomous positioning of religious imagery and tradition and, in turn, tradition and North American history creates a correlation between the theological practice and nationalism. Both entities, whether it be a catholic school or society at large, disregard the suffering of Black Americans, particularly impoverished Black Americans. What is nationalism in America if not a religion? What would the practices of such a religion be if not those that excuse institutionalized racism and suffering?
“Words / Wisdom” uses well-placed censor-styled black-outs to omit and connect words in presenting this very argument. The poet warns that “one by one” (omission) “America will find a way to eliminate the problem/ One by one” (19). “Words / Wisdom” further warns that American systems often believe that “The problem” (omission) “black youth of the/ ghettos” (19). The second omission here implies equivalency, tempting readers to fill in the blank and arrive at the tragic “The problem (is the) black youth of the/ ghettos” or a similarly disconcerting statement (19).
Disconcerting though such connections might be, Butler’s work isn’t here to coddle readers. I came into Sacrilegious excited to experience a collection of poems that I hoped to address organized religion in a way I often see—critiques of rampant homophobia in the Catholic church, the greed of television preachers seeking donations, etc. Instead, I was confronted with the idea that religion might easily provide an easy scapegoat for racists who lean into perfunctory conceptions of forgiveness. Butler’s poems may have pushed me into a place of discomfort but they did so in the most masterful way possible.
In fact, when attempting to think of a critique to put to Butler’s work the only thought I came up with was that there wasn’t enough of it. Sacrilegious could have been twice or three times as long and I would’ve gladly read it and likely came away feeling as though more would do. So, for those looking to read religious or political themes rehashed in the same, predictable ways, I suggest looking elsewhere. However, for those looking for timely and evocative work that ties together individual pieces via powerful religious and political elements, I can think of no better collection than Chris L. Butler’s Sacrilegious.
Chris L. Butler
Sacrilegious
Fahmidan Publishing & Co.
ISBN: 978-1-7368371-4-6
12 March 2024
Jen Cheng’s Braided Spaces
Reviewed by Will Freeney
Jen Cheng’s Braided Spaces is structured on the Five Elements of Eastern Philosophy: Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood. Within these categories, upon these structures, she investigates the confluence/intersectionality of her experience as a queer Asian-American feminist. The result is her own, self-defined form: Feng Shui Poetry. The title of this collection is intended to convey “a welcome space for intersectionality, for the indivisibility of being who we are with multiple consciousness, and for a coalition-minded community where I don’t need to be split into pieces.”
Thus, despite the discrete five categories of the Five Elements and Cheng’s placement of her poems within one of the five sections of the book based on which energy they manifest for her, she acknowledges that for the reader they may resonate with a different element primarily. The expression of these five elements is, indeed, idiosyncratic and varies from one poem to the next, even within the same Element.
So, under Fire, we have a poem about cooking chow mein for her hosts in Chiapas followed by a poem about dragons— characters of myth but also placeholders for dismissive Asian stereotypes and appropriations—as well as a poem that tropes the speaker’s existence as painting—capturing the evanescent palimpsest of persona.
Earth – which is about self-care, which includes creating the self’s solid identity – manifests as a poem considering the queering of that persona via the acquisition of a pipe, a la Hemingway, to achieve that personal “je ne sais quoi.” “From Rachel” is a manifesto of personal power, inspired by and framed in the character of Rachel Chu in Crazy Rich Asians. “postmodern sapphos” returns to the sybaritic sense of self-care as relishing all the pleasure and passions.
In the section dedicated to Metal (conveying precision and beauty), Cheng considers immigration as personally experienced by her family members in “Border crossing” and returns to the food motif with “Chinese food as political act,” which suggests we should “Feed everyone with love so we can stop this nightmare / Feed them Chinese food as a political act.”
Within the Water (career) section, “Waverly” alludes to the beloved character/narrator of that name in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club as well as the street on which the speaker served as “my mother’s sherpa.” Then identity in the workplace arrives at the intersection of wardrobe and sexism in “Job requirement: fishnets or pantyhose.”
Last but diametrically distant from least, the Wood section presents that Element’s concern with family, beginning with the poignancy of “From the first time I tried to get pregnant” to the pantheistic address of familial gratitude to the “Mother Tree in Franklin Canyon.” Concluding the section and the book is a poem which in its title evokes Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” but in its form is more synoptic, though similar in emotive content. It is undeniably a unique poetic voice which declares, “We bloom in unfriendly places / season after season / Still I speak undeniably / with dandelion fields of gold.” And that is a prescient assessment of the poet’s achievement in this charming, significant chapbook.
Jen Cheng
Braided Spaces
Self-published
18 December 2023
Tiffany Troy’s Dominus
Reviewed by Felix Torres
Tiffany Troy’s debut full-length poetry collection, Dominus, centers around finding openings in spaces of enclosure.
Restraint takes on many manifestations in the collection, some of them material (“I am chained to the bottom of the sea”) and others ideal (“a Twin, a Wink, / a Key to our repressed psyche”) in an attempt to understand it from many perspectives, as if it were a site to be navigated through. The theme is so rigorously inspected that by the end of the collection the reader comes no closer to understanding who is responsible for restraining the poet: instead of assigning fault, Troy withholds it.
Much of the imagery in Dominus draws from the poet’s experience as a child of immigrants living in Queens: traffic lights, the DMV, rats, and plastic bags. As the poet searches for the “golden center of the heart,” the city landscape takes on attributes of Greco-Roman epic (“Master, as Aeneas did, dreams of resuscitating a lost dynasty”) and Judeo-Christian saintology (“Maria Goretti stands straight in knee socks in the cold, / miracles fit for Baby Tiger”). Everyday experiences are adapted to a cast of characters from these classical stories and the poet’s own creation, lending the collection an air of fable.
Among these characters are the protagonists-antagonists, “Baby Tiger” and “Master.” Their relationship resembles what Virgina Konchan describes as “a symbiotic power dynamic whose pathos rivals Cordelia and Lear” in her review of this collection. Master is no doubt a sinister figure: “Master is smiling with his teeth”. At times, he’s downright abusive: “I expect Master’s body quivering with want to beat me.” Yet, for all the crimes he commits, he is vindicated in the occasional rêverie: “Master feeds me at the red lights. I rejoice in that golden hue in my warm milk tea.” The effect of these narratives is akin to connecting discordant musical points into lines, and lines into motifs.
Troy deals in ambiguities. While she embraces her experience as a litigator, she isn’t interested in making declarations. Instead, she uses the courtroom as a site where judgment is held in suspense; “An Elegy for the Foolish and Undignified” serves the best example. Who is the judge in this courtroom? Despite its straight-forward language, the prose poem doesn’t give an easy answer.
“Some judges have died on me with cancer and car crashes. I pray in Judge Heaven, they will be smiling down upon us, like that effigy RBG at the New York Surrogates Court I saw on my birthday.”
The Greco-Roman and Christian legend provide a mythical backdrop to the legal order the heroine is begrudgingly embedded in. It can be risky for a poet to flex classical references; since the stories are well-known, there’s little room for error. Troy pulls it off, though, showcasing a talent for finding thematic parallels from stories across cultures.
At times, Troy does seem eager to declare political sentiment (“The señorita tossed your fries into the white bolso de plástico, / a sign of outlawed privilege”), yet the earnestness feels brave in a literary landscape that is saturated with irony and cynicism.
Dominus is a resounding success. For all that is worth discussing in the book (eating as a leitmotif, perfectionism, lost innocence and abandoned homelands, dominance and submission), what echoes beyond it are the questions that remain when family is understood as a bond, a contract of constraints and freedoms.
Tiffany Troy
Dominus
BlazeVOX
SKU: 978-1-60964-441-3
7 November 2022
Rebecca Burke’s In Between Spaces: An anthology of disabled writers
Reviewed by Syd Shaw and Andreea Ceplinschi
Creating deliberate visibility for the under-represented voices of disabled authors.
In Between Spaces is a stunning anthology of disabled writers, a collection of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction spanning genres, ages, and genders. Encompassing stories of everything from birth to death, from first dates to hospital visits, what stuns about this collection is its diverse and breathtaking scope. This collection is a record of lived experiences placed in the context of disability with and without evident physical symptoms or effects. It is both a roadmap to a divergent way of navigating the world and an awareness guide for the non-disabled reader.
The anthology is built on a variety of voices that not only showcase a visible literary community of disabled writers, but also offer valuable insight to aspiring allies wishing to better understand and support said community. In “You May Mistake This for a Love Story,” Teresa Milbrodt writes, “I’m not saying love isn’t real. I’m saying it’s alive.” These stories are first and foremost alive, brimming with the energy of the people behind them. While the anthology touches on themes of loss, of suicide, of violence (all accompanied by considerate trigger warnings), at its heart it feels like a celebration of being alive.
One of the stand-out elements of this collection is the variety of approaches to storytelling. In “Management Problems,” for instance, Tessa Weber embarks on an investigative journey of her own life with journalistic deliberation. The author shows herself making sense of her early life experiences by sharing medical records and pictures of handwritten answers to questions she had asked of her mother. In doing so, she brings this piece beyond the scope of sharing an experience with illness and subsequent disability, going deeper into the effects of dysfunctional family dynamics in early childhood. The factual approach of the essay serves as an almost clinical record of how disabled children in dysfunctional environments experience a particularly high level of difficulty in developing secure attachment, healthy self esteem, and healthy coping mechanisms.
A common thread of this anthology is the issue of invisible disability, from degenerative physical illnesses that don’t present with immediate outward symptoms, to neurodivergence and mental health. Zan Bocke’s “My Favorite Felony: An Unexpurgated Account” gives us a startlingly honest step-by-step account of a bipolar psychotic break, in a voice of almost clinical inner-objectivity. The tone of the piece is intimate and diary-like, bringing the reader along for the literal ride as the speaker of the piece matter-of-factly details 24 hours of her life. Experiencing these events from inside the speaker’s mind shines a brutally honest light on behavior as a symptom or side effect of mental health disability.
Another important aspect of visibility this collection explores is that of the shame of being disabled. Several of the anthologized pieces star speakers who try to hide their disability in order to fit in. In “Carnaval, Upstate” Christina Hartmann sums it up in one poignant sentence: “we all just want to belong to something.” In “Your Very Own Low-Vision Dating Adventure,” Wendy Elizabeth Wallace actually places her speaker in between spaces, in between the desire to acknowledge and show her disability, and the desire to hide it in order to have a “normal” dating experience. Vanessa Garza explores even further in her piece “When My Broken Brain Misfires.” She follows her speaker’s journey from denial of her disability to acceptance, sharing with the reader the deeper truth in facing a disability: once someone accepts disability as part of their reality, they become part of a community that both functions and is labeled differently. Many of the pieces in this anthology explore degenerative disabilities as a key component to developing in a divergent way, as speakers of the pieces grow to understand that other people in their immediate environment, be it family members or friends, don’t grow up with the same condition.
In the introduction, editor Rebecca Burke writes about her need, as a disabled writer, to be visibly represented. She curated this anthology with the intention to reflect and celebrate disabled lives in the literary world. In Between Spaces absolutely delivers on this mission with a wide range of pain and pleasure. The disabled speakers go on dates, they paint, they leave for college. They call their mothers, or avoid calling their mothers, or miss their family from long ago. In Between Spaces portrays a wide range of perspectives, but above all it portrays human life. Everything moves forward. As Jill Rachel Jacobs writes in “Confessions of a Reluctant Zebra” as the speaker wakes to face another day: “We begin again.” Ultimately, this collection serves as an important piece of literary history, a recording of a status quo often unseen or ignored. It steps out to encourage disabled writers to share their stories, and, more importantly, shines a spotlight on disabled voices in a raw and honest way.
Rebecca Burke
In Between Spaces: An anthology of disabled writers
Stillhouse Press
ISBN: 978-1-945233-15-9
EAN/UPC: 9781945233159
15 October 2022
Michael Harris Cohen’s Effects Vary
Reviewed by Andreea Ceplinschi
A look at childhood trauma and clinical psychology in character-based horror fiction.
Horror has always been my favorite genre. I could talk your ear off about old Stephen King and Shirley Jackson classics, new Ryan Murphy series, and every B-rated storyline in between. Diving into this collection with the knowledge that I’d be reviewing it, I came up with every possible clichéd opening line, from “new-age King” to “would love to see this as the next series on streaming platforms.” While true, none of these felt right, because my background is in poetry and what good is that background if I don’t use it to analyze the metaphor in everything, including horror? It is with this approach that I’ve concluded that Effects Vary isn’t just a book of short stories. Tapping into a more sophisticated horror, this is a collection of twisted modern fairy tales without the fantasy balm of happy endings.
Approached from a fairy tale perspective, these stories reveal themselves as distinctly protagonist-driven: even when in third person narration, every piece is told from inside the psyche of the main character, leaving no doubt as to whose voice we’re listening to. And because of that, we’re following not only the action in any given piece, but also intimately experiencing the main character’s internal reactions to the events, making every tale not only the development or rather the unraveling of a plot line, but also an interior journey of psychological transformation. In a broader sense, breaking down the metaphor of these stories boils down to dissecting the protagonists’ psychopathologies as they experience and react to various traumas in dystopian settings. The effects of these experiences on the characters… well, they vary.
Some of my favorite pieces in this collection have child protagonists and explore dysfunctional child-caregiver dynamics and their effects on the juvenile psyche. The opening story in the collection, “What Happens in the Dark Will Soon Happen in the Light,” is a perfect example of how a child repeatedly exposed to darkness can learn to accept and then become darkness, or simply put: develop a fight trauma response. I guess in this context we can call it a fight trauma effect. Children as predators have always been a hair-raising trope, but the taboo truth of Cohen’s child protagonists, like the children in “Another Mother,” is that they are made into predators by consistent exposure to suffering and the need to overcome it.
The generational aspects of trauma transference are explored in “The Book of Skies,” or “Harvest,” where protagonists are actively taught to live with, and even pass on distress under the guise of tradition and rite. The religious overtones in the stories that explore the brutal will of parents enacted upon children make those narratives particularly disturbing as they sometimes hit a little too close to contemporary fanaticism.
To observe the opposite effect, the flight trauma response in its extreme horror expression of suicidal ideation is elegantly illustrated in stories such as “We is We” and “Done to Scale.” Whereas “We is We” reads as straightforward escape from captivity by means of death, in “Done to Scale” the child protagonist’s suffering only paints the background. The child, only known to the reader as the girl, shows her lived trauma to the reader through doll game episodes in what feels like a clinical assessment session of a budding sociopath. Horror fiction relies heavily on a good plot twist to climax a narrative, but here, Cohen showcases his skill with a more subtle and somber turn of the tale. In this story, the child repeatedly exposed to dysfunctional behavior from her caregivers becomes victim rather than predator, her doll game devolving into an expression of suicidal thoughts.
And what would a fairy tale collection be without a coming-of-age story? “He Dies where I Die” is the exact opposite of what a classic tale of self-discovery wrapped up in a happy-ending bow would be, the antonym to Plato’s allegory of the cave. The surface plotline is that of a teen protagonist descending into the same dangerous mine that took his father, in hopes of finding gold. Neat metaphor, right? He even encounters a treacherous guide, this story’s version of Gollum if you will, who lures the young man deeper into darkness not only with promises of gold, but also with stories of his missing father. As the plot develops, the journey into the dark belly of the mine (or perhaps mind) blurs the line between the teen’s two motivations to continue. In a clever twist of events, the protagonist ends up being quite literally eaten from the inside out. What an instant classic! One of the best modern-day stylistic representations of how childhood abandonment (the missing father) can be both a driving force in the journey of self-discovery and a destructive one in the pursuit of worldly delights (the search for gold).
I was quite taken with this collection for the 2022 spooky season. I got notes of childhood trauma and criminal psychopathology, but you might enjoy the explorations of cult mentality and brainwashing with clueless clones in science labs or willing patients in wellness centers. Or you might be drawn to the one about obsession where the gifted ends up consumed by their dark gift. Or the one where the trauma-formed predator gets what’s coming to him, trapped in a box by the consequences of his own actions. There’s a little something disturbing for everyone in Effects Vary. And yes, I do hope Ryan Murphy reads this review, and buys the book, and makes it into the next season of American Horror Stories.
Effects Vary
Cemetery Gates Media
ISBN: 979-8-846111-66-0
ASIN: B0B8PHVHQQ
10 July 2022
Cyrus Cassells’s The World That the Shooter Left Us
Reviewed by Dilys Wyndham Thomas
Cyrus Cassells opens his latest collection, The World That the Shooter Left Us, with Adrienne Rich's "And Now." Here, Rich's poem acts more like a manifesto than an epigraph; Cassells wrote The World That the Shooter Left Us following the stand-your-ground killing of a friend's father, and this is a collection in which the poet has indeed "tried to listen to / the public voice of our time / tried to survey our public space." Exploring the state of democracy and the role of personal advocacy and political activism in the United States, the book urges us to "sit down with a human stranger" to try and make sense of it all.
The World That the Shooter Left Us holds up a mirror to contemporary society and explores violence in all its myriad forms—recent political scandals, mass shootings, police violence, racism, homophobia, child sexual exploitation, and rape culture. However, it is the poems' protagonists that take center stage. Cassells is adept at character work, and The World That the Shooter Left Us is peopled with a dizzying array of voices, both real and imagined, often caught in the maelstrom of world events, including a victim of child trafficking, a mother mourning a dead activist son, antebellum slave catchers, and an irate President Trump on the phone with Zelensky, uttering the prescient lines:
Hell, it's wartime, Z.,
& you're downright starved
The most successful poems are those in which Cassells allows this storytelling and character-building to come to the forefront and the characters' individual voices to be heard. I keep returning to the closing poem, "Tango with a Ghost," in which a man grapples with the death of a former high-school lover, Alejandro, who fell victim to State-sanctioned terrorism during the Dirty War of Argentina.
Yet, despite this multiplicity of characters and voices, The World That the Shooter Left Us is strikingly cohesive in structure and form; reoccurring words, imagery, and punctuation allow connections between individual poems and sections to resonate and build to a crescendo. Many of the poems in the collection are written in couplets, yet Cassells' constant use of enjambments makes them feel almost artificial, formal constraints with which the language must reluctantly comply. This tension between formal couplets and free-flowing enjambments is perhaps best understood as a visual metaphor, a physical reminder of the themes explored in the collection: duality, us-versus-them rhetorics, the divisiveness of a two-party voting system, the psychological splitting that makes us see the world in black-and-white.
Another surprising linguistic feature of the collection is Cassells' liberal use of hyphens, em dashes and underscores, which help punctuate the work with alternating bursts of rapid-fire lines and silence. Many poems use em dashes, allowing the reader to take much-needed breaths while also visually evoking the path of an arrow or bullet. Likewise, the use of underscores seems to literally and physically underline the things we leave unsaid, the taboos we uphold. By cloaking these taboos in silence in a collection saturated with the sound of gunfire and violence, Cassells makes them feel incongruous. This is particularly apparent to me in "Me Too, Me Too," where an adult protagonist finally finds the courage to put words to the abuse he suffered as a child but, out of misplaced modesty, somehow still cannot make himself use correct anatomical terminology:
That Mr. Side Horse
With his hot, pleasing mouth
& mighty wrists,
His washboard stomach and outsized _______,
Wasn't my boyfriend,
God help me, but my abuser…
Interestingly, the book both opens and closes with screams for lost innocence, and human cries come back repeatedly in the poems. The verb to bawl appears at least twice: we bawl our collective grief in the title poem, and an orphaned child bawls after the El Paso massacre in "Harum-Scarum Photo Op." The collection opens with the narrator wondering if:
Our highest mission isn't just to bawl,
But to turn the soul-shaking planet [...]
The blunt, vitriolic white man's
Unnecessary weapon,
And the ruse of self-defence
Into justice-cries and ballots?
Yet it closes not with a rallying cry or reassuring call to arms but with a desperate roar:
A volley of shots, a roaring:
The castaway limbs of shunted,
Blindfolded students
Stiff as storefront mannequins in the river.
It is a startling ending, one which brings us right back to the beginning, to the title of the collection, and, as such, echoes the cycle of violence in which Cassells' protagonists are trapped.
The World That the Shooter Left Us offers up no easy answers, no superficially pleasing linear narrative from which we could derive some sense of solace. Instead, we find ourselves staring straight down the barrel of violence in poems where the political and private collide, where public tragedies and personal traumas are interwoven and interlinked. As a white European woman who has never lived in the United States, I found myself going down Google rabbit holes trying to understand the historical and political references that form the book's backdrop. At times, I questioned my right to review the work. Perhaps this is ultimately the point of the collection: to compel us to confront our prejudices and demons, to learn to separate fact from fictional narrative, to do the work.
Cyrus Cassells
The World That the Shooter Left Us
Four Way Books
ISBN: 978-1-954245-09-9
eISBN: 978-1-954245-17-4
29 March 2022
Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell: Poems
Reviewed by Holly Allen
Themes of religion, otherness, and the immigrant experience. Going into Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell (2021), this was the extent of my knowledge. I had not read a newly published collection of poetry by a single poet since Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus (2019). Oculus had left me in awe of its eloquent prose and the great array of topics broached therein. Because of how impressed I had been by Mao’s writing, I was concerned that I might be disappointed after moving on to something new. I was craving that same feeling of astonishment, that same intense interest in writing that demanded it. So, I returned to collections published with Graywolf Press to try and recreate that feeling. Did Pilgrim Bell present similarly varied themes and complex, eloquent language like those I’d previously enjoyed by Mao? No, it did not. Akbar’s poems have succinct language and tight, purposeful grammar free of verbose flourishes. With a lack of overt eloquence, Pilgrim Bell’s qualities worthy of appreciation lie elsewhere.
The fact is that Pilgrim Bell’s directly-addressed themes and no-nonsense lines are one of its great strengths. The poem “My Empire” makes its straightforward nature apparent from the very first lines: “My empire made me/ happy because it was an empire/ and mine.” (Akbar 24). The sentence as a whole is not only free of unnecessary frills, it is also direct in communicating its themes on imperialism, narrow-sightedness, and selfishness. Though these themes occur throughout nearly all of the pieces compiled in Pilgrim Bell, Akbar does not finish the poem without including elements of religion and doubt as well: “The prophets came to participate in suffering/ as if to an amusement park, which makes/ our suffering the main attraction.” (Akbar 24). These aspects of laconic, straightforward language and direct themes act together to create poems that seem unafraid.
This unabashed, puissant impression is often intensified by Akbar’s skilled use of punctuation including, at times, the lack thereof. The eponymous poem, “Pilgrim Bell,” uses frequent, almost jarring periods to create evocative statements and flashes of imagery: “Only a god./ Can turn himself into./ A god./” (Akbar 5). On the other end of the spectrum, poems similar to “Against Memory” employ looser form, letting the words flow sporadically across the page, free of punctuation. Both pieces, however, contemplate the wicked who are fortunate, question the legitimacy of theological teachings, and present a collection of metaphysical musings. Much of these philosophical themes can be summarized by a few lines of “Against Memory”, which read: “I envied the wicked when I saw/ the prosperity/ of the wicked/ I needed/ fewer moving parts/ an hourglass/ has thousands/ a sundial has only/ the earth” (Akbar 58). This particular distillation is an excellent episteme for the time being. In our current time, as the division of wealth becomes more apparent and class consciousness is discussed openly on social media, exploring the cruelty of “the prosperity/ of the wicked” seems apt.
Pilgrim Bell is a collection of poems for our time for reasons beyond discussions of theology and injustice. The critique of imperialism is specifically aimed at America. Kaveh Akbar’s work explores the classism, racism, and xenophobia knitted into the very fabric of American society. One of the longer poems present in the collection, “The Palace”, explores these issues at great length. What’s more, it does so with simple yet beautiful language: “America the shallow breath,/ how to live?/ The shallow trap, America/ catching/ only what is too small to eat.” (Akbar 68). The use of the word “breath” conjures uncomfortable images of the murder of George Floyd, who himself echoed Eric Garner, while the following line “how to live?” echoes the struggle of Black Americans. However, the lines are hardly pinpointed on this single issue alone as surrounding lines hint at other crimes committed by the monolith that is America. “The dead keep warm under America/ while my mother fries eggplant on the stove./”, for example, calls up the genocide of Native Americans and others who commonly go un-mourned by America today (Akbar 68). The gender divide and commodification of the feminine present in mainstream American culture, as well as the importance of the military industrial complex, are also conjured in the following line: “Who to kiss the prom queen?/ Brain pulsing like an oyster./ Who to win the war?/ America rises/” (Akbar 69). Altogether, the presence of commentaries and critiques on America’s sexism, materialism, war-mongering, and systemic racism come together to create a poem for this moment, and the moments in American history leading up to the now.
While “The Palace” is a complex, gorgeous piece of poetry that covers multiple injustices present in America today, it is only a single poem of Pilgrim Bell and though many of the others included cover similar topics, the straightforward language and almost brusque use of punctuation make for a strong voice. Though I found this collection while searching for something just as eloquent and varied as Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus and while Akbar’s work is not similar in tone or style whatsoever, I was still thoroughly impressed. Pilgrim Bell is a collection that echoes the worries and woes of today, as well as the horrible injustices of yesterday. For those readers eager to explore such topics through succinct lines and purposeful arrangement, I cannot recommend Kaveh Akbar’s work enough.
Sharoll Fernandez-Siñani’s From the Center
Reviewed by Anna Genevieve Winham
Time feels strange as I read Sharoll Fernandez-Siñani’s debut poetry collection, From the Center. The poems appear in three languages, Spanish, English and Aymara, alongside Fernandez-Siñani’s vivid, geometric paintings from her series “Creation,” which her beginning note suggests “dance” with the poems.
I speak English. I don’t really speak Spanish. And I really don’t speak Aymara. Reading this collection becomes for me an act of constant movement and partial understanding. I tear through the short lines in English only to reverse and read the same lines in Spanish, much more slowly, spotting cognates as well as alternative linguistic lineages. Then I look to the Aymara, a language I’ve read about, and one that’s particularly intriguing to the sociolinguist in me because it’s one of few languages where the future is encoded as being behind the subject (as in, tomorrow is behind you but yesterday is in front of you). It’s spoken by people living in the high Andes. I’m really only familiar with European languages--as far from English as I’ve yet ventured is Ancient Greek--so reading the Aymara for me is both fascinating and opaque. My amateur linguist eyes perking up, I look for patterns, repeating syllables, roots, rhymes. I find ghosts.
This is to say nothing of the dance. Fernandez-Siñani’s hint that the paintings dance with the poetry suggests music is at play. The series’s name, “Creation,” in combination with the repeating, geometric shapes, gestures towards the music of the spheres, celestial geometries, the invocation of creation through language. The colours and shapes often hit me even before I reach the words, once again muddling my experience of reading in time. This may be a dance, but the creator is leading and I’m trying to keep up with two left feet.
Two figures haunt these pages: the speaker’s late grandmother and late father. The tension between the spirit, the breath, and the body moves through the book: absences make their presence known. We meet the sensual “feast of figs / pomegranates, olives / and dates,” but also the spiritual, “What opening / must / the body / maintain / to reestablish / the missing spirit?” and also the meeting of breath and body: “Breathing / allows life / or its dismemberment / To breathe / is openness.” From the Center is most truly a hybrid work: hybrid across mediums (paint, language), genres (poetry, prose), and cultural traditions (“Western, Jewish and Aymara”). Tension is its currency, creating as it goes rhythm and harmony. Fernandez-Siñani’s verse vacillates between scales cosmic and human, from the tale creation to the journey of her own healing. The book itself is an object to meditate upon, a pool much deeper. Fernandez-Siñani asks more questions than she answers:
What does it mean to repair?
Why do we need to
heal so much?
Is darkness Light
as yet unveiled?
Where do you refrain?
Where do I stop?
Where do you stand?
Where do you look from?
Where do you speak from?
Where do you heal from?
Where do you give from?
What is restoration for each individual?
What is it for her people?
What is it for the whole?
When I ask about healing
Which part asks
and which part holds back?
This book is a well. Dip your cup in it.
Alex Passmore’s Hydrants
Reviewed by Elinor Clark
Hydrants is a refreshing and intoxicating read, which I flew through in one sitting. It’s composed of twelve short stories, many only a few pages long. The slim size of the collection is deceptive, however, with more ideas and images packed into these 100 pages than in many books ten times its length.
In Hydrants, Passmore creates an exciting fusion of realism and surrealism, mixing poetry and prose to give her stories a vibrancy and life which lingers on beyond the final page. Throughout the book, Passmore takes the reader on a trip into an exotic array of strange scenarios. From a tale about a child carefully preserving a sheet of paper, to a story about a whale contemplating the advantages and disadvantages of living on land, each character we meet is unique and memorable.
In the opening, titular story, ‘Hydrants’, we see through the eyes of a young, female narrator as she discovers the exhilaration of her first taste of independence. During a strip game while out driving with friends one evening, she finds herself forced to test her limits and see how far she will go. Passmore carefully builds up tension inside the steamy car:
“It felt dangerous and intoxicating when it was me, who lacked the speed, last to reach for the ceiling carpet of the car. Everyone’s eyes were on me buzzing with anticipation to see what was underneath, even if I was only stripping a sock”
The story then moves to a haunting conclusion, which highlights the insidious ability these early experiences have to shape us throughout our lives. The rest of the collection builds on the themes of sexuality, power and anxiety introduced in the first story. Passmore experiments with a variety of forms throughout Hydrants, while recurring ideas bind the collection together as a cohesive whole.
The whole collection sits on the edge of poetry and prose, with a number of the stories straddling these two forms. Others cross over the boundary between prose and poetry more decisively. ‘9/15/6’, for example, fully embraces poetic structure and images. The story opens with the statement:
“I wrote you a poem from where things are better”
As the poem unfolds, we find the narrator attempting to escape from a suffocating situation. By the end of the story, she has finally realised:
“I almost destroyed myself over a speck of dust.”
‘Lizard in my room’ is another story in which Passmore experiments with form, as the narrator lists a register of unfortunate creatures discovered dead in her home.
“May 7th – moth in bathtub, wings separated but close by.
May 21st – 3 flies on bookshelf, but separate shelves. Friends? Possibly knew one another.
May 23rd – ants in guest bathroom shower. Possibly came up through drain.
June 18th – centipede stuck in tile grout.”
I enjoyed the relatability of the work, the everyday observations which run throughout each story. Somehow even in the bizarre range of situations Passmore places the reader in, the insights from her stories feel utterly relatable, encapsulating the lived experience of being a woman. There’s a great vulnerability in this collection which breaks down the barrier between reader and writer. The stories are beautifully unique.
Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Death, Desire, and Other Destinations
Reviewed by Anna Genevieve Winham
Sex suffuses Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Death, Desire, and Other Destinations, but it isn’t exactly sexy. It’s more desperate; it feels more like dying. One story, “Snowstorm,” begins “the snowstorm sends us home early from work, so we fuck and sleep.” Midway through another story, “Spin,” we hear that “on the TV screen, demonstrators are holding signs. Earth is tired of our weight. Let it rest. That evening in her studio apartment, we fuck relentlessly.” As well as being filled with a seductive, destructive sexuality, Zambrano’s debut collection seems permeated with dread, a sense of impending doom that may or may not give rise to new and warped life or society in the aftermath. It’s this dread that gives the siren song its violent edge.
These fifty fictions oscillate between literary realism and literalised metaphors:a forgotten human heart left in the women’s restroom that becomes a kind of relic, an alligator that appears in the road only for a girl to claim it came from her dream, a widow’s husband who resides in the pipes of her house. Zambrano implies we don’t have sex with people but with symbols, when she writes of a man consuming his lover, the narrator, along with all his ex-lovers, with the aim of “true, unified love, opening and closing forever like the valves of his heart,” or when she discusses a tall, ad agency executive who begins sleeping with a dwarf:
While they are happy in a dreamlike life, the girl realises the dwarf has leaked into her—her hair wiry and unruly, her voice a deep rumble. He has faded—his clothes two sizes too big for him. A shudder runs the length of her enormous body. Catching her breath, she asks what’s happening to them. “My love we’re becoming one. Everything is connected to everything,” the dwarf answers, his sound a minuscule noise. She smiles thinking he has a way with words. Until she can’t move and swoons in her bed all day, calling his name, a piercing sad hum picking up inside her. Now a wandering speck because he has nothing left to offer, the dwarf stands at her eyelash or hangs by the long nail of her index finger, holding up to the pull of life, trying to find meaning in their perfect companionship.
Throughout the collection, the borders between entities twist and cross. Bodies are not immutable and certainly not inviolable. Gender and sexuality switch and merge. What began as one thing suddenly becomes two or swaps places with something else. While the collection is not bound together by character or plot continuity, a strange, dreamlike logic of shifting sands unites the stories. While there’s no set of settings, the stories seem grounded in the middle east and Indian subcontinent. Characters are alternately Muslim, Hindu, or assimilating Christian; they cook Ghosht Korma, eat mangoes, and drink bourbon. They have affairs, dream of their husbands’ ex-wives, and are reincarnated.
In “Across the centuries, the rumbling calls out to her,” we follow a character named Rama through numerous lifetimes. In traditional Hinduism, Rama is the seventh avatar of Vishnu, a male god who is responsible for the upkeep of the universe, but in Zambrano’s retelling, Rama is a queen, a mermaid, a rock, a courtesan, a woman considering leaving her husband, a woman who “watches the red-yellow oil, separating from the spices yet a part of it. Like land and water crisscrossing for centuries, touching the sky and falling, bodies slowly invading another, each time accessing a depth full of hunger, ungauged, unseen.” In some sense, the collection is a series of brief experiments, small universes where characters play out and die, only for their themes to return elsewhere in the sequence. Zambrano reaches for symbols and remixes them into new systems, their rotation through the collection giving them new meanings in new iterations. This collection is nothing if not hybrid, a kaleidoscope of humans and viscera, sex, death, and what might happen in between.
Esteban Rodriguez’s (Dis)placement
Reviewed by Zac Furlough
(Dis)placement is a collection of poems that serves as a trail for readers to follow, a migration of immigrants and whole communities to traverse, a road through brutal deserts and transgressed borders that is littered with limbs and blood. Rodriguez showers his readers in image after vicious image as we join the speaker on this most sacred and difficult of journeys. From the first stanza of “Prelude,” the poet pulls no punches and sets the tone for this collection early: “First, they will take your goats, / display their heads and flayed skin / on clotheslines, fence posts.” The divide and tension within communities and peoples is a constant theme that is embodied by the violence throughout these poems.
The poet utilizes allegory in a way few can and maps out a vast wasteland of political, racial, and nationalist cruelty that flirts with being overwhelming while maintaining a coherent purpose: the journey to escape persecution. In “Psalm,” which serves as a sort of interlude in the collection, Rodriguez writes, “Praise the moon – full and on patrol – / as it looks away, lets us reach the edge”. The natural landscape is both combative and unforgiving but allows moments of reprieve for the speaker and his company. The desert is a consistent image, even in poems with a more human landscape, that embraces the severity and desperateness of the speaker’s travels while being an active backdrop for the poet’s exploration of individuality and community. While we often see a speaker that is isolated, tormented, and even hunted, it is the sense of togetherness that holds this book together. The speaker is made to represent, in many ways, the tribulations of an entire people, while also embodying the lonely journey of self-actualization. These poems are devastatingly sad, visceral, and violent, but the underlying message here is one of hope, of perseverance, and of togetherness.
Charlotte Pence’s Code
Reviewed by Elinor Clark
In Code, Charlotte Pence takes an unusual approach to grief, using a scientific lens to explore the emotional and physical impact of illness and injustice. By entwining poetry and science, Pence tackles themes of loss and death in a deeply personal and yet detached way, creating a sense of inevitability and raw vulnerability in her work.
The first section of the book drags us at once into an oscillating flow, which never quite allows us to get comfortable in the string of poems. Pence alternatively takes us to more hopeful places, the quiet of the neighbourhood during the 4am breastfeeding and the “open wide and greedy” mouth of a child’s smile, before immediately dragging us back to the brutal side of life with the iconic Empire State suicide jumper and the haunting realisation that “on that day,/ she, like the rest of us, dressed for the cold.”
This flow of poems is broken up in the second section by a short essay about Pence’s friend and poet, Shira Shaiman, who died of cancer. Pence recalls finding Shaiman’s forgotten MFA manuscript in a box of winter clothes and the disorientation of grief the discovery brought on. The inclusion of five of Shaiman’s poems add a new level of meaning to the book’s themes of motherhood, illness and genetics. Shaiman’s poems explore her experience of her own mother’s cancer and the grief and loss she felt at her death. “I’ve become the face in the moon/ pasted in space and no ladder” Shaiman writes of the poignantly too real fear the disease may consume her too.
A second essay provides an interesting meditation on prehistoric cave paintings and their purpose and creation. “Stubby Horses and Why We Paint Them” explores the use of the self in art as we follow a family’s trip to see cave paintings in the Cueva de las Monedas, ending with the thought-provoking question: “Why aren’t there self-portraits on the cave walls? All we have are red hands without arms reaching out in the dark.”
At the core of the book, Pence places an inventive and deeply moving narrative story of a couple, A and T, who have a child U, only to discover that A has a genetic disorder. Facing A’s rapidly deteriorating health, compellingly represented by increasingly free-form and jumbled poems, the couple attempt to navigate their relationship and new parenthood in light of the disease. I particularly enjoyed Pence’s thoughts on motherhood. “Motherhood is obedience” she writes in “the New Mother, Wants More Instruction”. “The desire came/ from some tangled place”. By the end of the sequence, A concludes “Lack of want is beautiful”.
Throughout the book, Pence explores how our bodies connect with the world and interact in relationships, from the role of the body in motherhood to the way grief and parenthood influence intimacy; while the couple once “gulped” sex, things have since grown stagnant. Pence takes us through these painful topics while carefully avoiding sentimentality. With an often playful voice and deliciously upside down word play, Pence infuses Code with a joyous exploration of language. “Three mud- / puddle frogs // leap-flee / from me” she writes in “Zwerp”, while in “Lightening” she describes a baby “Twisting/ your way down. Lightening,/ they call this. Feeling/ of Levity.”
Her poems venture into a range of themes, marrying family to violence, exploring the internal and external impact of grief and laying out the genetic code for a range of degenerative diseases, including Sickle Cell Amenia and Colour Blindness. Domestic settings expand into “the fracture of stars, bright/ as raw bone”, as we discover the “small mysteries” are really the big ones. Throughout Code, Pence disperses quotes from various thinkers including Siddhartha Mukherjee and Richard Dawkins, giving extra insights into the role of genetics in our lives.
Whilst reading Code, I was constantly reminded of death and illness as hideously unjust, something we can’t prepare for and can’t fight against. But while we may be determined by the inevitability of death and our genetic codes, Pence reminds us that right now we have the freedom to live and love. Beyond the helplessness, we can take strength from the vulnerability of life. Code is a thoughtful look at how ethics and science intersect with grief and relationships, weaving together a complex and insightful range of voices and viewpoints. Code left me feeling wrung-out, but with new insights and ultimately hopeful.