Otherworld Ambush: A Review of Jacqueline de Weever's Trailing the Sun's Sweat

It’s thrilling to read the work of a poet who draws on varied interests, pursued with passion and erudition. That is the case with this vibrant collection of poems, written by Jacqueline de Weever. A professor Emerita of medieval literature, she is also an accomplished watercolor painter and collage artist. Her decades-long devotion to scholarship provides the underpinning to these hauntingly painful poems, written in response to The Journal of Christopher Columbus, translated by Cecil Jane. The famous explorer penned observations as he encountered the “New World” and its inhabitants, whom he clearly regarded as less than human. As if to crawl inside Columbus’s skull, de Weever writes:

Which leaf, which plant or flower packed
in parchment by botanists companioning
slave-ferries of humans wedged in excrement

can erase shackle bruises healed
to ridges of jelled skin?

Here, we witness the inner workings of colonialism in all its cruelty. To morally justify genocide, one needs to portray its victims as inferior. Even today, eminent domain is invoked to perpetuate superiority over native peoples. Sadly, imperialism has repeated itself through human history. But this is our country, where Columbus is lionized and celebrated every year.

A rhetorical question springs to mind: Why is this journal not better known? This collection forces us to question our notions of historical accuracy. However, the poet knows that it is crucial to show, rather than to tell. Instead of railing against the crimes and inhumanity perpetuated by colonialism, she avoids didacticism and finger-wagging. She creates delicate, broken settings in which violations are enacted: “[S]oft bellies of our islands, / penetrate our forests, / slice our drums.” We experience destruction and abuse as if they were happening to us now. The horror is amplified as she includes snippets of Columbus’s journal, much like a linguistic collage. Indeed, de Weever’s considerable talent as a visual artist informs her use of language. It comes alive through the agency of imagery: the nuanced colors, the feathery textures, the flicker of a dark butterfly. We are never manipulated into what to think or feel. Instead, we emerge from this timely and necessary collection transformed, for we have lived the anguish of the poems; we have sweated their blood.

The poet also explores the depth of human contradictions. In “Lament,” Columbus concedes, “All display the most extraordinarily gentle behavior.” Yet, later he asserts, “I took the natives by force to give me information.” This is acknowledged by a man who had no moral quandary in killing to obtain land and raw products. The poem weaves repetitions and rhymes, shifting from the first person of the journal to de Weever’s indictment of Columbus in second person, “You plot their enslavement and I weep / that their offers of cassava and casareep / did not contrive the magic wand / of their safety …”

One of the many gifts this poet possesses is the control she wields over voices. Plaintive wails rise from erased histories to ignite the reader’s awareness/empathy. To do so, de Weever always writes with lyricism and humanity. The speakers, whom de Weever would have us remember, are still “whispering lost languages in warm winds, / waiting for the cyclones of hurricane season / to howl their vengeance in the ocean’s / requiems.”

Indeed, “Currency” is a chant against forgetting: “Their ghosts infect later landscapes, in wind howls, / in lightning flash and thunder crash familiar / in Ghana and Malawi …” Notice the subtle use of alliteration and internal rhyme. It’s as if de Weever has transmuted the luxuriant colors from her artwork into the richness of wordplay and sonic invention. This as an example of synaesthesia—color and form becoming sound and syntax. But her literary devices are neither facile nor ornamental. They propel the reader into these poems and histories. She establishes a poetry of place. Setting, often associated with fiction, has an important job to do here as well. From the first page, we are transported in time and place. We smell the nectar and the sea. We see the “white ginger in clouds of butterflies.”

The journey, into the past and across the ocean, becomes the reader’s journey as “a slave shipped along routes / shown by the map on the wall. // He explodes, split open…” Like a cartographer, one moves through this book’s peregrinations, hearing a choir of disembodied voices, some speaking in apostrophe, directly to the reader,

Tonight I am Maya
weaver of the cosmos and its gods
into my garments
my shawl, my blouse,
although not my genes
but who knows?

We are drawn into the poet’s inquiry of self. Beginning with “I am,” she invokes the Hindu concept of the material world as illusion. She ends with a rhyme for her own last name; after all, this is about identity. Indeed, she is weaving times, places, fragrances, histories. She’s examining notions thought to be accurate, histories deliberately erased like a palimpsest. But, through the alchemy of language, these histories emerge again, begging to be heard, revealed in the audacious light of truth: “Memory—what is it? / Silence ripens into weeds / daring yellow.” Jacqueline de Weever does indeed dare to upturn our cherished, long-held beliefs about the heroes and victors, exposing “sacred landscapes” that may have vanished in their original state, but which live on—redolent and triumphant in these poems.

Consolationeer by Marc McKee

I read, reread and considered Marc McKee’s Consolationeer (Black Lawrence Press, December 15, 2017) on the bus, in the twenty-minute intervals allotted to me between home and work. This was, of course, a matter of practicality. Nobody really chooses to read poetry on a lurching, sputtering metal behemoth in the meager light of sunrise and sunset. There’s chatter from all directions, shoulders brushing against yours. The text scuttles around the page like a line of ants. In my native Chicago, some rides are gaspingly hot and others are glacial. There are often fellow passengers engaged in antagonistic conversations with one another or, more frequently, with themselves, and it’s hard not to dwell on the possibility, however remote, of danger. The windows are flipbooks of poverty and opulence, billboards and graffiti, homelessness and high-rises. Some mornings one misses one’s coffee. Some evenings find the brain bobbing in the marsh of a stressful day’s work. The bus is a maximally chaotic environment for the senses and typically not at all conducive to engaging with a text.

Reading Consolationeer in this setting, however, was a serendipitous exception. If you live in a major US city with an unreliable and unpleasant public transit system, I can’t recommend the pairing enough. McKee’s language is all rattle and excess, loose spokes and depressurizing fuselages. It is the literary approximation of whizzing past shop-fronts and construction sites and dog parks. In “O Passenger Manifest,” one of the later poems in the book, he writes:

…The bus is a colored cloud of ill portent
hanging by an axle disagreeing with a girder,
a baby tooth before before before.

After reading that passage, I looked around me and nodded with a little frown of recognition. Yes, I had indeed found myself anxious on an uncontrollable machine, lunging into who knows what horrifying consequence. Yes, I was balancing on a damp ledge. And McKee had managed to bore a peephole into that sensation.

The poems in Consolationeer are very much of a piece, and they thrive on the suspense of “ill portent.” This is a book about the apocalypse – how we define it, how we describe it, how we contend with it emotionally and philosophically. McKee is hoisting an impossible task upon his shoulders, of course. He’s attempting to make sense of comprehensive finality, to stand in the shadow of a tidal wave and point out the bright side. Even the title of the collection seems to balk at the enormity of its author’s ambition. We are prompted to consider the act of consoling the doomed alongside acts of exploring, piloting, inventing, crafting. We are not used to navigating this emotional territory; intrepid bushwhackers are in high demand.

Certainly, these poems have been sculpted more by machete than by scalpel, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. In fact, there’s a refreshing urgency to McKee’s shotgun style. I hear Eliot’s ecstatic distractibility, Schuyler’s sonic gymnastics and O’Hara’s restless melancholy, all filtered through the dirty chinois of cable news and global warming. A recurring motif is a match near ice, two mutually destructive forces accelerating one another’s demise. McKee writes like a mad chemist scrambling to whip up an antidote – for every soluble line there is a combustible one. And sometimes, he tinkers his way towards something truly revelatory, something that encapsulates all the terror and anger and hope and solidarity swirling around this most frantic of eras.

I can’t stop thinking, for example, of the opening lines to “How We Respond Is What It Means:”

At this time it is impossible not to love
at least one monster.

This is the type of observation we’re all sure we’ve made but somehow haven’t been able to articulate. It’s grammatically and conceptually “simple,” but it contains the depth and mutability of all the best poetry. Listen to clinical register in those first six words. They call to mind canned rejection letters, fatalistic meteorological reports, ultimatums from hostage-takers, insurance companies denying a claim. They ooze mutual disappointment. The phrase, “at this time” also serves to highlight the now-ness upon which these poems hinge. There’s desperation in the double-negative that follows, voice and sorrow in the words, “at least one.” A beautiful tragedy is compacted in these lines. And moments of such luminance pop up like prairie dogs throughout the book.

Sometimes, as in “It Has Never Not Been Thus,” McKee’s apocalyptic landscapes resemble Charles Simic’s, but with the heart shifted confidently to the sleeve. The poem is dire at first:

…It is night. A lemon scythe rises,
then overwhelms its fulcrum,
the plants camouflage themselves
in decline…

But it shifts dramatically at the end:

It’s a beautiful night
among the surviving leaves,
I am happy to be here.

Elsewhere McKee calls to mind Jay Hopler, as in “We Are All Going to Die, and I Love You,” which cheekily begins,

The world is ending again
only this time we are sure.

The poem mounts in anxiety and madness and lyricism, climaxing with,

…But but but! such fantastic plumage of viscera! such spirits
hot-glued to properties! such a muchness,
of dismantled wheels! Really?…

Those tonal changes offer a little glimpse of McKee’s signature move: the insertion of hazily optimistic, affirmative mantras in the midst of catastrophe. I think it’s fair to call them “consolations.” At times, I have to confess, this approach becomes a little predictable. One gets the sense that the poet is resting on his laurels a bit, dropping consolations like puffs of smoke in order to escape from despairing litanies. But when it works – as it does with impressive frequency – it works. The best McKee consolations come on like smelling salts, slaps to the face, adrenaline injections. They’re best when they’re heavy with irony and complexity, when they’re woven naturally into the text that precedes them. Take, for example, the following passage from the Schuyler-esque “Lately Indesolate:”

The yellow car de-hurries so rapid
it appears to ripple and bunch

in the rearview mirror: such a silly yellow
to be screaming that way,

followed after by wheelsmoke
like a languorous countercloud, train

of a wedding gown. Nothing happens.
Which is to say an awful lot very nearly

happens…

Here, the shift from disaster to serenity helps to philosophically frame both sensations. The reader questions his or her instincts – what does danger feel like? What does safety feel like?

I’m also drawn to these two contrasting passages from “Soft Watch:”

Any inventory is a story invented into life,
a swarm of pictures made to march,

this how we row our battered boat
into one now’s future…

…Here we stand among the bramble
of fallen calls and broken shields

and your eyes will not stop opening…

I caught myself reading this poem aloud at full volume and looked up to find a half dozen fellow commuters glancing nervously at one another. I may have been the crazy stranger on the bus before, but I hadn’t noticed until then. In any case, there’s an exquisite development in this poem from collapse to reconstruction, and it contains insight into McKee’s coping strategy. Listing these inventories, these invented stories, is a way to journalistically explore the decline of our civilization. Cataloguing the piles of detritus around us can serve as both diagnostic survey and meditation.

I would say that effect is most vivid in “Some Names of Ships,” my favorite piece in the collection. In it, the speaker walks down a bay and regards the names of docked vessels with alternating bemusement, melancholy and fear. The little lyrical treasures within are too multitudinous to list here, but I’ll point to an excerpt from the center, which I think is both apocalypse and consolation.

What can track a freckle of light right out
of netsnarl and gravity until you forget

you’re at the mercy of the sea?
Here’s Passengers, here’s One Train.
The name should be able to stay almost still

beneath the teeth of the broken champagne bottle.
Are we not always on some dock
choosing between Paradise and History?

And then some boats never launch
at all…

I used to fear the bus, long before I had no other choice. I didn’t like the confinement, the absence of an escape route should something go terribly wrong. I didn’t like how directed it was, how inevitable the stops. I was afraid of relinquishing control. Now, thousands of bus rides later, I can appreciate that all those worries were entirely called-for, but perhaps lacking in perspective. Because while a bus ride is quite like crowding a barrel full of strangers and hurtling it over a waterfall, it’s also a communal experience. An adventure, even. The person sitting next to you is infinite in his or her potentiality. All passengers are stripped of their egos and statuses for a moment. They’re all given to the contingencies of the vehicle. And in that strange, captive solidarity, there’s something exquisite. I think that’s what Consolationeer is about.

Lucid Dreaming: Michael Rothenberg's Wake Up and Dream

Michael Rothenberg is a political organizer who herds individualistic cat-souled poets into the world’s largest poetry reading each September, who co-founded the life-saving organization, Poets in Need, and who participates tirelessly in important contemporary causes. Thus, I was surprised to read the vividly sensual and descriptive poetry, based on real flora and fauna and earth, of Wake Up and Dream. Alongside calls for skinheads to martyr themselves and the warning that Monsanto owns you, there are haiku-like, real-to-the-touch lines depicting our planet’s landforms and beings.

And as I read on, I realized: this is why Rothenberg is an environmentalist, this is why he is political – it is because of this cellular love for the concrete world around him and its people, places, and things. From “Revolt of the Donkeys”:

Only fools
plan

for a better
world

Five minutes
a day

under
the carob tree

we speak
without

fetters
But mostly

we carry
carts

of sweet
oranges . . .

The poetry, like Rothenberg, is global. Whitmanesque, the poet conjures the cities of the United States, and, like an ancient prophet, calls forth nations: Macedonia, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, China. Ancient, the deserts and mountains hold history and the poems reveal their diegesis. The land heals “cannibal” political wounds. In “Bozo the Slick,” Rothenberg juxtaposes the “baby Mussolini” world of the con man (guess who?) with his beloved Italy:

Alburni . . .
Virgil saw this mountain

There was a thunderstorm pelted
The terra cotta shingles
We shivered through the Amalfi night
In a house built in 700 AD
In a town built long before the redwoods . . .

Of course, these poems are political, if by political you mean aware, tough, punk. Rothenberg summons “Baudelaire (borderlands),” as the poet alliterates, and Henry Miller, to his aid as he makes his protest and dances with:

Exhausted senses, wild visions
Timelessness, days without dates
(Deities) . . .

Even when the poet trips with surrealism and Language riffs, the poems are wide awake; the dream in the title is never a fuzzy oneiric sleep. Through despair and exhaustion, the poems sing to what we are fighting for, what Rothenberg insists we make real in our world, what we need to preserve. It is the dream of an alive, non-GMOed, non-conned reality that stems from love for our planet and ourselves.

The Analyst by Molly Peacock

The Analyst is an elegy for a living woman—at least, for the position she once held. She was the psychoanalyst the poet confided in and relied on for decades. A stroke now prevents the analyst from working in that capacity. In addition, this book invokes elegies for other losses in the poet’s life: the death of her father, mother, sister, an abortion, a divorce. The therapist supported Peacock throughout that painful sequence of events. But now, as the beloved mentor succumbs to limitations imposed by the stroke, Peacock—in a role reversal—becomes more whole and vital.

She does this by looking back. For example, the broken relationship with the author’s sister was put into perspective by this remarkable therapist. Peacock writes, “Thank you for witnessing this use of the imagination: / I began to creep away from the crevasse, / it was war, away from the ocean of her heroin addiction.”

It would be an oversight not to see these poems as also mourning facets of Peacock’s self, “I believe in being killed, and I believe in poetry.” In release, in “dying,” she is liberated to create. The role(s) the analyst played through transference—as lifeline and confidant—have been manifested in the therapeutic act of writing poetry. However, healing is rarely perfect or complete. Peacock admits:

And partly healed injuries have
their own torque … Bones
(minds have bones) grow even
after they’re operated on …
human growth is complicated

As she delves into her abiding love for the analyst, she also explores how that woman has helped her to navigate and endure anguish:

Thank you for not believing me when I said I was suicidal
(my dad had died and evaporated into smoke
—that rageful man, yes, slowly I admitted I had
half his genes—bomb—vaporous beneath
the heavy gray apartment door).

Each death, or transformation, is guided by the loving perception of the titular analyst. In addition to being an elegy for the relationships and histories that have been subsumed by others, this poignant book is also a love letter to the confidant:

Thank you for that silhouette I saw
wearing your earrings and belt
as I stood at a podium before a darkened theater,
the vast audience unmoved after I failed to entertain.

Now, that stalwart mother-figure has been felled by fate and physiology. As the beloved analyst abandons speech, the tool of her métier, she learns to wield another one like a wand: the paint brush. She returns to an old love—painting. Although this actually occurred, it can also be seen as a metaphor for the growth that the analysand shared with her analyst. Indeed, this book is a tribute to the transformational power of art. While the title refers to the therapist, Peacock—her patient, student, daughter—has been reborn and redeemed through her multifaceted literary gifts: “[Y]es, each of us is many-roomed.” This is a nod to the word “stanza,” meaning “room” in Italian. Certainly, Peacock is a deft practitioner of the architectonic aspects of poetry. As such, it is worth noting the range of forms and voices that swirl with authority throughout this collection. It’s as if each poem were searching for the boundary beyond which pain ceases to exist. And yet ache (rage and fear) drives these poems. They fuse into a dissonant dirge:

Our jaws could eat cement.
Anger chomped at
the marriage wall
ate the glass windows of friendship
and bled from its stone teeth,
muttering, Oh not, I am not, at all, at allI am not at all

The elegiac focus extends to a contemplation of the poet’s own mortality, which she handles without ever being maudlin or melodramatic. We even catch a glimpse of the brutality of American history. At the New York Historical Society, the poet and her analyst catch sight of Dying Indian Chief, Contemplating the Progress of Western Civilization: “You duck beneath him with your wobbly cane / then upturn your face toward his, contemplating // his sober view of hysterical society.” This brings to mind The Dying Gaul, a sculpture that captures the anguish of conquest, the erasure of a culture, and death. How the human body is like history, with its fragility and indignities. The trope of the stroke extends its shadow. This recalls Susan Sontag’s seminal book, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors. Despite lamentation, a striving to prevail permeates these varied poems:

and live the raw I am, as you do now,
relearning how to show

the few of us who stay in touch
how to twist and learn.

Variety enlivens the forms of the poems. Form, for which Peacock is prodigious and rightfully famous, has been liberated into a new, more raucous version. The effect is thrilling. Formed, yes. Formal (in the sense of solemn and constricted), no. These trenchant poems burst every seam that attempts to bind them. The result is one of luxuriantly musical phrasing. Here, Peacock employs terza rima:

Three Tibetan monks make a sand painting
(under spotlights) in a reverential hush,
the circular world before them everything:

a cosmos, a brain, a divine palace lush
with lotuses and pagodas in children’s
paintbox colors. “Excuse me, my friend is

recovering from an accident …”

To enter more deeply into the world of images as words, Peacock bends her voice to a place where visual details take over. The image, like a Chinese character, carries the weight of thought and emotion. In this, she inhabits the analyst’s visual locus, where color and form have meaning, where a leaf flickering in a breeze is a poem. Simile is too tenuous. Transformation occurs; this is the realm of metaphor.

                        Here,
when all are there,
the sky shows through
a peephole: a leaf hole
shapes
getting nowhere
out of the blue.

Through loss upon loss, metamorphosed into the marrow of Peacock’s language, she writes, “Only when / something’s over can its shape materialize.” The losses reconstruct themselves from vapor, rise from these pages, and insert themselves into the reader’s mind, where they will not be forgotten.

Celebrating the Humor and Humanity of Black Women in Not Without Our Laughter

Written collaboratively by the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy & Sexuality is a book of poetry that centers the voices of six black women: Saida Agostini, Anya Creightney, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, celeste doaks, Tafisha Edwards, and Katy Richy. Editor celeste doaks posits that this book, itself a riff on the Langston Hughes title Not Without Laughter, offers “temporary shelter from the storm” of present-day racial injustice and gives voice to the experiences and laughter of black women. These voices, says doakes, have often been marginalized in the struggle towards equality, a struggle which would ultimately be lost without the laughter and voices of black women. And rightly so. The collection is riotous—often times humorous, but seasoned all throughout with devastating moments of depth that give punch to the levity.

The book is divided into sections of varying lengths by theme, with such titles as “…Our Lists and Litanies” that complete the phrase “Not Without…” They run a gamut of personal experiences and daydreams, from fantasizing about other women’s husbands to the ethical dilemma of getting rid of a mouse. The majority of the poems take on a conversational tone, with the exception of those poems like “Prince—Album Cover” that utilize reverent, elevated language for the sake of comedic effect: “With the lavender dreamscape behind him/ who was this god, naked astride a Pegasus?” Throughout, the poems bring a wide range of nuance and diversity to the black female identity and experience, which emerges, along with the empowerment found in vulnerability, emerge as an overarching theme throughout the book. Though the book features six different poets, the work as a whole is unified in its voice, tone, and execution of vision.

The collaborative format of the collection functions on a variety of levels. Although the collection is edited by a single editor (celeste doaks), and although the poems are written by individual poets, this book does not read like an anthology or themed journal issue. Beyond the identity of “black female poet” that the six women of the BLBC share, the voices, forms, and themes of Not Without Our Laughter share a thematic flow. For example, Anya Creightney, Saida Agostini, and Tafisha Edwards all write at least one poem in prose form, without line breaks, and there is an entire section in which various poets take on the poetry-as-list format. Though the handling of these forms varies, the repetition of their use by different authors lends an overall visual and stylistic cohesion to the book.

Poems in the book interact specifically with each other, as well. As readers will see from some of the italicized subheadings in the by-lines of each poem, there are poems in the book that are written as specific responses to other poems. While there is inconsistency in the effectiveness of the response poems—some, such as “Kamal and Beebee” come “after” poems that appear later in the collection, while others such as “Finding the Divine” read more like criticisms of the poems to which they are responding than as standalone poems—there are some response poems that are true gems. “Atomic Snowstorm” takes the words from “Ars Poetica with Fever” and scrambles them to create a new poem with a unique meaning. “Knowledge of the Brown Body” responds to “harriet tubman is a lesbian,” itself a poem about reimagining historical heroes as queer, to riff beautifully on the risks and implications of loving a black female body during the era of slavery. “If Harriet Tubman had been a lesbian,” the response poem says, “I would know the brown body had been/ valued outside of chattel, to the point of risk.” Actively engaged with the prior poem, “Knowledge of the Brown Body” takes the concept of one poem, a poem about a queer woman re-writing history to create a queer hero, and exploring the implications of that concept in a new way, i.e. what impact a queer hero from the slave trade era could have on black women and “the brown body” universally. It is moments like these where the response convention really electrifies the work as a whole: a woman’s personal desire for a hero that speaks to her own identity becomes universalized, valuable to anyone with a brown body. These responses speak to the book’s overall theme of nuancing the identities of the collective while also unifying them. Regardless of the strength of each individual response poem, the response poem convention overall makes for a dynamic work that engages, re-engages, and rethinks its subject matter and themes much like an individual poet’s collection of work would do. This work is alive and engaged within itself, more so than an anthology or journal that merely collects the work of various authors, occasionally centered around a loose theme or aesthetic.

Nonetheless, there was one way in which the multi-author collective could have taken this convention even further. That is, it may have served a book written by a collective to have some actual individual poems written by multiple authors. Not Without Our Laughter does a great job of maintaining visual, stylistic, and thematic cohesion throughout. Still, where can one really draw the line between a “collectively written” book of individual poems and a well-curated anthology? A couple of multi-authored or collectively written poems may have gone a long way. Nonetheless, the collection still stands as a cohesive collective work in its continuous self-referencing and its sharing of form among poets throughout the work.

As is the case in many multi-authored books, there are inevitably poets whose work rises to the top. Saida Agostini and Tafisha Edwards emerged for this reader as the standouts in the collection. Agostini’s language and imagery is ablaze without fail throughout the collection, starting with her first poem “Adventures of the Third Limb,” a hilarious but touching ode to the speaker’s dildo and the way “she” brings the speaker and her girlfriend together: “she is fluent in seven languages, drinks dos equis, can paint, sing gospel,/ praise dance and is head usher at the church of dynamic discipleship.” Readers of Not Without Our Laughter will have their eyes light up when they turn a page to find her name italicized below the title, promising strange and fresh perspectives on familiar archetypes, historical figures, bodily functions, and amorous encounters. Likewise with Tafisha Edwards. One of her poems, “Top Billing,” begins “Starring My Pussy as” and goes on to list a litany of invented roles that range from hysterically funny to heartfelt and empowering, including “Doom of Man™” and “My own Mound of Oshun.” Like Agostini, Edwards stands out as a strong, highly developed, intriguing voice throughout the book. This is not to suggest that the quality of poetry in the collection is overall inconsistent—though readers may at times find themselves wanting more from some of the poems by celeste doakes in light of the overall more powerful voices of her five counterparts. Rather, Agostini and Edwards provide two voices that further electrify this otherwise highly energetic collection of work.

In a supposedly “post-racial” society that still commodifies, dehumanizes, overly romanticizes, and overly criticizes the lives and choices of black women, Not Without Our Laughter does something radical and important: it features poems about black women being purely, unapologetically human. This is a book of poetry that values honesty and humor over self-seriousness, and yet the book does not lack depth as a result. Mason Jar Press has a true gem on its hands in this book by the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, and it is a gem you’ll want to get your hands on.

Medusa's Country by Larissa Shmailo

Medusa peels herself from the pages of mythology to become a denizen of New York City’s margins. There, she waltzes with Thanatos: “The dance with death? / Ah, this: as I flirt, you draw near.” When Eros shows up, he lures Medusa on a peregrination toward a broken self: “My naked heart unrobes, undressed of anguished cries.”

Shmailo adds, “Larissa’s rose is sick and is consuming me.” This alludes to William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose,” pertaining to self-destructive sexuality. While beautiful, the rose has become infected by a worm. Addressing herself in an epistolary moment, Shmailo states, “Dear Friend of ferment / who unearths worms // that enrich this blissful human soil.”

Here lies one of many moments of transformation. The poet, though brutally honest about her bouts with mental illness, mania, and deleterious behaviors, also acknowledges the alchemy available by casting pain into language. Purged, the expectation for starting anew enriches this “human soil,” fecund with possibility and, surprisingly, hope. Here is one of the many strengths of this collection of poems—it is relentlessly honest and (therefore) resilient.

These qualities guide the poet’s exploration. Along the way, the gorgon assumes other personae, including a prostitute named Nora, a reluctant villain, not unlike Medusa herself. Once, one of Athena’s priestesses, she was raped by Poseidon. Instead of being seen as the victim, Medusa was held responsible by Athena, who turned the gorgon’s curls into snakes (Blake’s worm?) and made all who gazed upon her turn to stone. Medusa was ostracized by her own power. Shmailo avers, “His eyes transfixed by my serpents / that hardened, froze, and pleased.” Indeed, misogyny has—from antiquity to Ibsen’s era to the present—castigated women who dared to exhibit intelligence and power. Many of these poems lead the reader through histories of misogyny and sexual abuse (as in the myth itself). In a poem titled “Rapes,” Shmailo confesses:

I abandoned myself to invisible hands,
the known vice and the strong vise of my nerves and my glands.
I half-screwed and cat-moaned and imagined your stare
in the stranger, his knife slowly teasing my hair.

She unpacks her poet’s suitcase of prosody and nuanced rhymes, knowing that a poem is not only about a given topic, but also about the agency of language itself. Like a stab, she writes, “The rapist called me fat.” Again, the victim, not the perpetrator, is rebuked. Nonetheless, these poems ultimately serve a triumphant voice—a brave and audacious “I.” Convinced of her prowess, this Medusa stares into her own mirror, where she confronts distorted notions of normalcy: “You, my reflection, in pain,” and, “We live in parts.”

Despite landing on a psychiatric ward, she frees herself with sardonic wit and blade-sharp language: “Bellevue, Bellevue, where nurses’ crazy laughter / rings through the night.” The writing is so visceral, the reader feels trapped in the “locked ward,” along with the author. One can hear the howls and smell the disinfectants.

However, with verve, with chutzpah, with urgency, Shmailo’s poems become spells, freeing her, transforming stone into flesh:

I spent my whole life seeking it,
wrecking, reeking, eking it,
in hydra-headed phalluses;
in aliases & pal-louses;
in papapapapaMedusas;
in mirrors & seducers.

Ultimately, she magicks death into an affirmation of life: “I love love’s desert and its snow.” Indeed, she has led us from one extreme terrain to another—and back to the silence of the page, where we marvel at her hard-won wholeness. As we read this book, it becomes our own.

What Was It For by Adrienne Raphel

There’s a fine art to saying nothing. A well-calibrated bit of gobbledygook can access psychological, emotional and philosophical truths that lie outside the purview of conventional grammar. Although recent trends favor economical, naturalistic literature, poets as pedigreed as Shakespeare, Lear, Carroll, Pope, Stein and Joyce regularly indulged in phonological gymnastics. That tradition is sustained and expanded in Adrienne Raphel’s irresistible debut collection, What Was It For.

These are dizzying poems. Raphel trades in nursery rhymes, limericks, tongue-twisters and fairy tales; punning and mondegreens and doggerel and spoonerisms. She seems to take particular joy in paradox and syntactic ambiguity. In lesser hands, these stylistic flourishes could read as ostentatious, haughty or even coldly mathematical. But Raphel revitalizes them in a contemporary context. She writes with emotional delicacy, keen self-awareness and, most importantly, palpable joy. Consider “An Owl,” which employs jaunty dactyls and an enclosed rhyme scheme to explore the titular bird’s desire to dive into the ocean. The third and fourth stanzas read:

But O down still more into levels of sea,
Clear to the dark until water is water—
Magnetic senses, spiraling inward,
Pulsing and pulling concentrically

To the center of centers, wound and unwinding,
Original color in imminent light—
And the animals rotate alone to their right—
Life-in-death, death-in-life, in the upending sand:

Raphel’s form beautifully suits her content. While we’re on the topic of concentric ripples and unwinding spirals, she uses assonance and repetition to sonically mimic the imagery. Even the rhyming pattern and indentation of the quatrains call concentricity to mind.

A similar strategy animates “To the Fountain,” a haunting but playful travelogue of a city whose baths have dried up and been converted to tacky fountains and a traveler who can relate to the feeling. “On the Carousel” and “So Many Metronomes” heavily utilize litany, repetition and double-entendre to both imitate the rhythms of their subject matter and convey a rather idiosyncratic neurosis. Frequently, the speaker is burdened by an intense desire to wring poetry from the tedious, bizarre or disheartening. There’s a stammering to Raphel’s voice, an obsessiveness. The singsong prosody often scans as some kind of mnemonic device, as though the speaker were trying to keep an idea from drifting away.

This approach is acutely pronounced in “But What Will We Do,” one of the many apocalyptic nursery rhymes to be found throughout What Was It For. I’m especially drawn to the following stanzas:

The tree thick with chirping without any sparrows
The church full of honking without any geese
Duck-yellow lemon-yellow gray-yellow gosling
Things getting closer I’ll turn on the heat

…

The heat it turns out has been on the whole time
What will we do when the pipes are all hissing
What will we do when the piper starts hissing
Don’t let the rats come it’s not time to start that

Here, the speaker’s preoccupation with home maintenance helps her cope with encroaching despair. Those silly, lingering passages about heat and pipes (the likes of which appear throughout the piece at large) manage to crystallize both the physical and psychological setting. The language evokes aging, paranoia, illness, depression, perhaps even insanity. We are glimpsing a deflating world through squinting, jaundiced eyes.

But Raphel’s craft isn’t limited to expressions of mania. “Note from Paradise,” the first poem in the collection, uses paradoxical language as a vehicle towards serenity. The piece opens “Somewhere in a Spain I think of as France,” and continues to describe “fields and fields, or one, of lavender.” “It is late summer, early winter.” “It’s fall. It’s spring.” “It was something like flying. / Well, it was very like something.” “Something supposed to be seen / is seen. Something’s supposed.”

Syntactically, none of these lines or phrases really communicate any concrete setting. But that’s the point. As the speaker’s roots bore deeper into this particular soil, the minutiae of time and space become irrelevant. The last stanza is a kind of statement of purpose, one that twists the preceding nonsense into focus:

What am I but a half-life
what do I do but I have
to do, to face these fields where they are
lavender first and by far.

Her blissful resignation is something like spirituality and something like intoxication. But first and foremost, it derives from and thrives in the pleasure of words.

An unassuming passage in “Glockenspiel,” one of the book’s less affected poems, reveals volumes about Raphel’s vision in both a literal and a figurative sense. The speaker is returning from an eye doctor’s appointment in her old hometown, which she is suddenly able to regard with newfound clarity. As she surveys her surroundings through a nostalgic lens, she recalls:

I did the jumble two ways
and both ways were right.

I got VERSE and LIVED
and RANKED and VEINED
and ENVIED and DANKER
and DEVIL and SEVER.

Raphel’s poetic persona is empowered by the malleability of language. Her past, her future, her internals and externals – they are all products of a phrase’s multitudes. There’s a taut weaving here between self and expression which can be felt in the morbid gibberish of “Hobson Jobson,” the Dylanesque ironies of “Boardwalk Block.” When Raphel perverts the sonnet in “I Go Ballooning” or presents a coyly feminist twist on the limerick in “Artic Exploration,” she isn’t merely playing with form in some rote, academic sense. She is operating technique in the service of imagination, and what she discovers in the process is spellbinding.