An Ouroboros, A Ceiling Crack, A Celestial Scale: A Review of Anna Maria Hong’s Fablesque

One of my first writing instructors told an early workshop of mine that every time he read a particularly good story or novel, his first thought was damn, I should’ve thought of that first. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that same sense of envy sometimes, as I wade through and untangle the genius, generous, boundary-pushing work of my peers and idols alike. Sometimes it’s impossible not to watch some brilliance unfold on a page in front of me and wish I had used some part of it in my own work. Other times I’m driven to pick up the pen myself and start falling down my own lines of inquiry, branching away from the inspiring material I’ve just read.

My experience reading Anna Maria Hong’s Fablesque, winner of the prestigious 2017 Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry, was entirely different, starting with the first lines of the first poem of the book. Immediately, upon turning through its first few pages, I recognized Fablesque as a cunning, yet untamable beast, a protean pinnacle of hybridity, courage, and wit, a text, I believe, that could only come from the mind of Hong, its creator. To me, this is the highest form of poetry, when a poet’s found a voice so uniquely their own that the power it wields seems as if it could shatter whole worlds only to bind them back together with song.

I would not hope to imitate or even try to replicate what Hong has done in Fablesque, how she balances lived experiences with the reclaiming of myth, how she moves so effortlessly from the high lyric to the narrative, to the historical, to the autobiographical. And, while it’s true that hybrid texts have been in vogue for the past few years or so now, I’ve never seen a book use its hybridity quite so deftly, so seamlessly as it’s used in Fablesque. 

But Fablesque has tied itself more closely to folklore and storytelling than it has to hybridity; while many of the poems in the collection don’t directly blur genre, the majority of them engage with folklore, whether the speakers orients themselves within these poems by aligning with starving wolves, diving through the history of windows and fish ladders, or retelling sometimes familiar stories with a biting newness. 

Fablesque hits the ground running with “Heliconius Melpomene,” named after the postman butterfly, which is remarkable for its ability to evolve rapidly, having become the subject of extensive study on speciation and hybridization in butterflies. “Heliconius Melpomene” starts with a fractured high lyric: “Not the branch but the dismantling. If// I could have seen the shape of it,// I wouldn’t have made the journey,” the speaker recalls before pouncing from image to image, landing on “venom in a bloodstream.” The next lines make a quick turn toward remembering the speaker’s father’s escape from North Korean soldiers at the beginning of the Korean War with the detached narration and high stakes of a fairytale: the father’s two companions, we’re told, are shot in the head, but the speaker’s father survives through an act of cunning.  The poem bobs and weaves again, turning to the perspective of the speaker at thirteen: “My middle-aged father’s smooth, blankly animated face telling the parable of his own cunning and lack of disabling empathy.”

Fablesque works this way as a whole, flitting between subject to subject, speaking the language of the unspeakable by bending folklore to the speaker’s needs to confront the Korean diaspora and beyond. These poems see things as they are, not as we’ve been fooled by the legends of our forefathers to believe that they are. I’m particularly struck by the language in the prose poem “Wolf: “The wolf was entrapped by its cravings—not for the Woodcutter with whom she has no quarrel or interest but for the Woodcutter’s beasts; his chickens, hit goats, his sheep, the animals of restive living” before continuing “But the Wolf is not picky. If the Woodcutter had kept monkeys, cockatiels, or Schnauzers, the Wolf would have pursued them too” later on. Not only do we see a desperate wolf caught in a trap, but we feel her hunger, her cravings. We see ourselves in her voracious thirst.

This, I believe, is where Fablesque succeeds most: bending folklore and convention to reimagine trauma, to recontextualize real-world suffering into fable and breathe life into the world of fairytale so that it, too, can speak to living in the world today. 

Poems like “Siren,” which give voice to an often-maligned creature like the siren, also strike me as particularly interesting.  The first few lines are spellbinding:

“When they turned me into a bird, they

turned me into a woman,

my top half full of breasts and throat,

the bottom all claw and dirty venom.”

Not only does this poem bring sympathy to the siren (which is traditionally known for luring sailors out to sea with their song only to devour them after they drown), but it gives us her origin, her twisted body, her dirge of fate. Later lines bring humor and sympathy into the present day:

“Goals for a Monday:

—rip out the knees of the patriarchy

—practice histrionic but alluring singing

—do laundry”

And while I can’t help but find humor in the “do laundry” note at the end, the other two goals strike me as human while also doubling down on that the idea of the siren comes from a historical, patriarchal demonizing of women and their sexualities. 

Many dramatic moments of Fablesque are also informed by the parataxic hybridity created by placing certain poems side-by-side, as in, say the abrupt, high lyric of “Kronos” with the fairytale-like “Snow Goose” and the more narrative “Blue Morpho.”  Fablesque is a collection full of tension, but it’s a tension that fuels innovation and encourages exploration for speaker and reader alike.

Some poems, like “Patisserie du Monde” are playful; some, like “HK Rules the Planet,” are puzzling; and others, still, are full of linguistic joy, as in “Amphisbaena: “The amphisbaena has no natural predators, being/ unnatural. Lust overlaps chastity,// bronze scales on a sealed ring.” Other poems interrogate ceiling cracks, basement wall cracks, wandering chambers, stairwells, and any number of spaces between. 

After all, the work in Fablesque capitalizes on the greatest power of myth: It isn’t real, but it speaks to reality. Fables aren’t true, but they speak to truth, and, in doing so, they create a liminal space for brilliant poets like Anna Maria Hong to reclaim myth from its patriarchal past and appropriate it for their own ends. Each time I read Fablesque, I find new moments of wonder, new amusements in this carnival of language to comfort me and discomfort me, to intrigue and unsettle. 

At face value, a poem like “Nude Palette” might read as frivolous with its opening line of “What a muse, what a mess, this state of undress,” though it quickly turns our attention to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 with its continuing lines of “descending the spiral stare—to look back is/ to profess, resume the harness, and lose/ the myth of progress.” These lines, along with the rest of the poem, are enchanting, but they also have something very real to say about the treatment and placement of women in modernity and other parts of the contemporary landscape. 

Fablesque is full of what an old mentor of mine would call “poetic fun,” but it’s also full of depth, intrigue, and commentary about the worlds around us, both real and imagined. As one might expect, there’s more wonder and more cunning in even a fraction of Fablesque than I could ever dream of including in this review, but I consider myself lucky for having had the chance to explore its geographies and dreamscapes, its intrepid spirit, its fearless takes on vicious beasts, astral bodies, and ancient gods alike. Any reader who gives themself the chance to fall in love with Hong’s work will find themselves grateful the same way.

The Multiple Deaths of Living: Reading Victoria Chang’s Obit

If I were to say, “My friend is experiencing deep grief right now,” I suspect that most people would assume that my friend is in grief because of the death of a loved one. However, the understanding of “grief” in the collective conscience — especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 — has rightfully expanded so that grief includes the loss of varying life circumstances. We grieve that we longer believe in the faith tradition we had practiced since childhood. We grieve after realizing our spouse isn’t the person we had believed them to be and we can’t save the marriage. We grieve over not being able to attend in-person classes without the constant worry of potentially spreading COVID. We grieve that our current lives don’t reflect the hopes and dreams we once had for ourselves.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” as Elizabeth Bishop famously remarked in her beloved villanelle “One Art.”

In April 2020, amidst the start of worldwide safer-at-home orders, Obit by Victoria Chang was released. The poems in this collection were written after her mother died of pulmonary fibrosis on August 3, 2015. Instead of opting for the traditional form of the elegy to explore her grief, in her poems, Chang chooses to engage in hermit crab writing by using the one long and skinny rectangle form of obituaries to inspect the multitude of deaths that unfurl in a human life. Though she does write about the literal death of her mother, she also writes about how her mother’s teeth metaphorically died after being pulled out. Other deaths that she writes about include her own ambition, optimism, and friendships. Interspersed in the book are tankas that Chang writes her children about subjects like death, hope, and love. In addition to obits and tankas, a lyrical poem spread over several pages is a part of the collection.

Grief is an inextricable part of our human existence. Though the specificities of individuals’ experiences with loss may differ, every human being will go through some sort of significant loss (should they live for enough years to eventually go through it). Just as universal as grief is, the need to have one’s grief be attended to is as common. I have acutely witnessed a multitude of metaphorical deaths and a literal death throughout my life, and I always felt that not even attempting to verbalize the ramification of those losses would eventually result in overwhelming agony. The first epigraph in Obit is “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak wispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break,” from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After that epigraph, Chang goes on to share 81 heartrending obits. Considering how many people prefer not to talk about their grief, the wisdom in the Shakespeare quote and the high number of obits in this book make me believe that most people don’t talk about grief as much as they should in order to find some healing, and there are perils in denying and avoiding the deep pain that follows a loss.

While I intellectually know the psychological benefits of speaking about loss and grief, I do recognize that speaking about loss and grief is really hard. As I examine the poems I’ve written over the past two and a half years, it has only been within the past year that I’ve mustered the courage to transmit the emotions of my grief experiences into poetry. I also noticed that, like most of the poems I write, those poems about grief were written in a free verse lyrical style. Writing more poems about painful experiences, such as grief, is an important goal of mine, and I am fascinated by the forms that Chang uses to write about her mourning. The obit poems are not only in hermit crab forms, but they’re also prose poems, which is a form that I’m easing myself into also practicing. The tankas that Chang writes also captivate me because they’re only five lines with a total of 31 syllables, yet they are filled with rich images infused in profound statements like “I tell my children / that hope is like a blue skirt, / it can twirl and twirl, / that men like to open it, / take it apart, and wound it.” As a lyrically-inclined writer, my writing can come off as rambling, and I’m gleaning from her effective directness.

Though most of Obit addresses the losses that she undergoes in her personal life, Chang ends the book with an obit that addresses shootings in Florida, particularly at Stoneman Douglas High School. This obit also addresses her mother as it begins with “America-died on February 14, 2018, / and my dead mother doesn’t know. Since her death, America has died a / series of small deaths, each one less / precise than the next.”

I’m so appreciative that, by addressing the deaths from shootings and the death of her mother in the same sentence, Chang reminds us that our willingness to explore the darkness of our own grief can nurture our attentiveness to the grief that occurs in other parts of the world. Our personal grief is inevitably bound to collective grief, and both types of grief are worthy of belonging in the same sentence. 

Like Victoria Chang and many fellow writers, I like to write about dark topics such as suffering and sociopolitical matters. I’ve never tried to write about my personal grief and sociopolitical events within the same poem, but I’m inspired to give that more of a try, especially as I become more keen on contributing to the creation of more peace in this chaotic world while simultaneously accepting the wildness of my heart and making peace with it.

As I read Obit and as I push my way through completing this essay, I struggle with the question of “What’s the point?” as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens and 2020 continues to serve one traumatic event after another. 

I suppose it’s worth giving words to those feelings,

the grief.

One Illuminated Letter of Being by Donald Platt

I knew of a woman who, in the course of a terminal illness, and without giving much thought to the matter, expressed a liking for sweet peas. Before long, every table, every shelf and windowsill, was filled with the scent and colour of this most youthful, this most joyful of flowers until she could bear to look at them no longer. Such are the pitfalls in the prelude to loss.

This rather sad memory resurfaced after reading the collection of thirty-two poems in which Donald Platt lets us in on the uniquely personal, but ultimately universal trials of his mother’s illness, her death, and his subsequent mourning. Unflinching, but tenderly descriptive, they take us through the quiet courage, the moments of weakness, the little acts of unselfishness inherent in such an experience, in a gentle, but compelling series of unrhymed tercets. Along the way, autobiographical detail lends colour and perspective to a slowly developing picture of Platt and his family’s relationship with Martha, an artist and lover of classical music, who died in 2014 in her nineties. We meet, among others, Dana, his “million-piece jigsaw” wife with her own experience of recent  bereavement; his brother with Down syndrome whom his mother had not wanted to see in case her “skull-like head and jack-o’-lantern face…” might terrify him; and his two daughters making origami creatures — a peacock, frogs, ducks . . . for their grandmother sitting immobile in her yellow armchair. 

In the opening poem the author is looking at an old black-and-white photograph of himself at four years of age, lying in a bed alongside his baby brother. Their mother is smiling as she looks down on them both. Her eyelashes are long, he notes, and “her hair’s cut short. She’s dead.”  It’s a stark and arresting beginning to a tale which combines pathos, perception and occasionally humour, as when Platt finds himself in the meditation room at Albany airport after visiting his mother at the hospice earlier. He recalls her saying “I’m so ready to die” and prays that she will no longer have to endure her ninety-six-year-old body wrecked by sickness and pain. He remembers too the shared laughter at that colloquial “so” she had learned from watching TV. There’s something rather beautiful in that little exchange.

There’s a mingling of the factual and the lyrical, the day-to-day and the emotional that gives this collection such honesty; gives it integrity. I liked Martha’s attention to detail in planning her own funeral in “Fantaisie” (“. . . Bill Eakins to preach” — “give $100 to organist”); and in “Watercolor with Trees in Fog” the author remembers watching his mother paint: adding one last touch, a scrap of yellow, before appending the picture with a price tag of $65.00. He concludes, rather touchingly, that he will never be able to repay her. “Cloud Hands” is set in a hospice with various wards or units given Evelyn Waugh-esque names such as Harmony Lane and Hummingbird Hill. The place is described in detail, even down to its odours of urine, disinfectant and meatloaf. In Whispering Pines, his mother tells him it was good of him to come, and in a heart-breaking scene familiar to many, “the tears well up and burn my eyes so that I can no longer see her.”

Early one morning he receives a call to say his mother has passed on. Lung cancer, it says on the death certificate, and coronary artery disease. He had been with her only two hours earlier. Her ashes are buried — “a birthday present to the cold earth” — but she lives still: he talks to her; tells her what he has been doing. He sees and feels her presence everywhere. Sitting in a garden near Aubagne, east of Marseille, she is in “the silver green leaves of the twisted olive trees”; she is “the rooster that crows all night in expectation of the dawn” and “she’s the smell of thyme I crush between my fingers.”  There is a lovely moment when the author relates the story of how he came by the scar on his forehead. His mother had reminded him, one month before her death, how she had pushed him and a friend down the street on a sled, and they had crashed into a milk truck. And now the scar, the “signifier of my pain, of my mother’s self-blame” has become to him “love’s north star . . . still shining fifty-four light years away.” Such are the small compensations for the guilt and utter helplessness felt when witnessing the decline and passing of a loved one.

Plants, flowers, the natural world generally, feature a good deal in this fine narrative of love and loss: the “frail and foolish” crocuses that stand undismayed by desultory snow; the red-pink cloud of blossoms floating up from a crape myrtle; the lavender moth orchid he bought for his mother, and which he refers to as her “death orchid”. In “Wisteria” he’s planning to grow a variety called “Amethyst Falls”, building it a trellis anchored in concrete:

                                         and strung with horizontal
galvanized steel cable. I’ll train the wisteria’s wrought-iron vines
to climb and twine

through these staves, to become a sprawling G clef that will flower
into late spring’s
lavender notes, cross-pollinated by bees, its sound and scent carrying far

beyond our backyard.
On the harp strings of the trellis, it will blossom again and again into one
illuminated letter of being. 

It is a splendid poem, the last five words of which provide the title of this collection, describing practically but also quite beautifully the making of this living memorial to his dead mother. 

An old poet once told Platt that flowers were the only proper subject for poetry; it was an idea he dismissed out of hand at the time, but now he’s not so sure. His mother is dying when everything is coming into bloom, and there is a sadness, but also a sort of comforting inevitability in that fact; a parallel explored within these pages in an even, an almost subdued voice which, in its telling, is a quietly persuasive celebration of life.

A Review of Black Ice by Kerry Shawn Keys

I first encountered Kerry Shawn Keys in the early 1970s at a poetry reading in Philadelphia. As I recall, he was hustling across Broad Street, carrying a large walking stick — brandishing would be more accurate — that looked as though  he had ripped it from a fallen tree and carved a knobby handle on the end. Somehow, I knew all about him, even before I met him — that he had been living in a hunting cabin in the foothills of the Blue Mountains in central Pennsylvania, that he hunted his own game, picked his own berries, and bathed in a warm spring deep in the woods. Oh yes, and that he wrote poetry! I don’t remember who was reading that day. It might have been Jerome Rothenberg or Charles Reznikoff or Robert Bly — certainly  poets worth traversing broad stretches of land to see.

Over four decades later, no longer the young man from the provinces — Keys’ new collection, Black Ice (his 30th or so) retains many important elements of his pastoral, mountain-dwelling past. In “Affinity with Beans,” he writes:

Last evening, I cooked potatoes and kale 
and a fish fresh from the creek. 
All quickly went to mush in my stomach.
Did they find another life there, a congenial rebirth,
or were they merely eaten away 
by the acids of nothingness into a nauseous mortality.

Here we have the Emersonian-Thoreauvian reveling in self-reliance and nature, and yet that innocent transcendental stance has been tempered by experience in the world. Keys spent extended periods of time in Brazil and India and, currently, Vilnius, Lithuania, where he’s lived for over two decades. The poem’s final lines present a more complicated view of the life of a hunter-gatherer:

Part of my supper by now has become part of my flesh,
and should a soul be inseparable from its tenure, 
do all these souls share my sense of oblivion, 
of our time asleep being our only redemption.

Although the natural world, the world of mountains and forests and streams, are still touchstones in Keys’ poetry, there is also the Shamanic, mythic, and primal urge to interact and manipulate that realm. “Ringing the Dead” evokes a terrifying upheaval in the natural order of things. The poet seems to be participating in a ritual where “throats exploded into fiery snakes, / arms and legs baked on the spot…,” where “tongues screamed in tongues” and “Bridesmaids married death.” This could be a scene culled from a dream, but it could also be a description or poetic reenactment of a pagan ritual from a remote region of Brazil or India, or even his current home in Lithuania, the last European country to convert to Christianity. A country rife with primeval forests and mushrooms, and remote villages, traditions suppressed throughout its long history — by the church, the Soviets, and now capitalist financiers.

No matter how far Keys roams from his Appalachian origins, he always seems to arrive — curious and eager to participate — urgently poking around with his carved walking stick. In “Hoffers,” regarding his ancestors — versions of which he encounters in far off places, he admits that he doesn’t

…know much more about them other than 
that they were like my father, all of them orphans. 
Their fathers and grandfathers, also doubtless, itinerant orphans, 
persecuted in their homeland to be rebaptized Pennsylvanian.

There seems to be a primal search in these poems, a search that in its very nature is at best futile and at worst treacherous. In “from Tao Te Ching Meditations, Bones & Buzzards,” a poem about his sojourn in Brazil, the poet (always and forever Orpheus) ends up with his head severed 

[floating] down the river into the jaws 
of the hippopotamus, the razored saws 
of carnivorous, Brazilian piranhas.

At first, I was confused by the presence of hippos in the Amazon. In the Greek version, Orpheus’ head just keeps on singing as it floats downriver; in Keys’ version, the beheading by the Maenads is only the beginning of the terror. And, although I have no way of knowing, I imagine those poet-devouring creatures as part of the escaped hippo-herd, now roaming the Amazon, that once belonged to Columbian drug lord, Pablo Escobar.

A significant number of poems in Black Ice seem to wander off the transcendental-shamanic path into the perhaps wilder and sublime field of fatherhood and family. These poems reflect Keys’ current existence as an expatriated American living in Vilnius, in what was once the Jewish quarter. In “The Curse,” he sketches his new life there:

Black mold on the wall in the kitchen, presque vu,
in the former Jewish ghetto in tonight’s upper room
drunken delirium, the blood of Rabbi Christ 
surfacing as frescoed pentimento long hidden.

The horrific barbarism of the not-so-distant past is ever present, unspoken but always on the tip-of-the-tongue, as he wanders through the old city with his kids. In “All Soul’s Eve (Vilnius),” as his son innocently questions whether the souls of the dead are really present, his daughter whirls about, fluttering her hands, “pretending that she is leaf and dove/let loose from a dark magic theatre above.” At times, Keys’ children — because they are his offspring — participate in the mytho-pagan realm alongside him. Other times, however, the world of fatherhood is more mundane, though hardly less poetic:

Now, there’s no vision of heaven or earth anymore, 
of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower, 
or mortal intimation of immortal, celestial realms 
other than the chirping, glad chorus of my children,
sweet Sonata’s boneless, tumbling, yearling twins

(“Aurora Aurora”)

I hesitate labeling Black Ice a poetic journey, even though it seems to begin with Keys’ actual birthplace and conclude in his newly acquired home and  family. The poems and the poetic gesture of the whole collection are much more complex, nuanced, and captivating. They conjure up the slick, translucent, and reflective surface over which we are bound to slip, glide, and skate, fully aware of the underlying darkness coloring it.  

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A Review of Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins

Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins, comes at you raw, unapologetic, heavy. From the first three lines of this poetic memoir, you know she’s going to be honest. This is her immigrant story and as she makes clear, she is in control of her own narrative.

I am 40,
I have saggy tits, white pubes and a story
to tell…

It’s evident Calderón-Collins will tell the reader the truth about herself, the entire truth, as she’s “lied my way through life not only/to others, but also mostly to myself.” This is in the untitled Introduction where she explains the essential reason for writing the book, for replacing the harmful “magick,” of making and portraying herself as someone she’s not, to a healthy, honest, truthful “magick,” “a magick that loved me back,” to make clear that her trauma did happen, that it’s not dismissible and to make clear the recursive process she uses to build a healthy life to avoid the setbacks trauma brings.

*

Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins was born in El Salvador in 1979, at the outbreak of the civil war between the government and a coalition of left-wing military groups. It was a time of unrest and violence, prompted by socioeconomic inequality, where “men/[walked] around/in dirty green uniforms,” where “I’d hear shots go off.” At the same time she fought her own personal war, the kind she said that, “lived/in dark houses.” The sexual abuse began at age four when Don Chepe and his wife were left in charge.

“It started with a kiss,” and ended with, “his cock/in me.” At four, this was the prevalent war in Calderón-Collins life, not some adult conflict over important adult issues she was too young to understand and played out at a remove from her immediate world.

The opening section after the introduction is written in a verse that draws the reader in and builds. Information is revealed gradually, in the same way people learn about themselves. On one page Calderón-Collins writes:

cracked hands scratch
the softness
of her thighs—
he is gentle, a giant

Then, two pages later she reveals who “he” is—Don Chepe. But how and why was he able to molest her? On another page it’s reveled he was left in charge of her, like a babysitter. The pieces of her life begin to fall into messy place; what kind of world she was born into and the consequences from living in that world. And from the gradual reveal of information, Calderón-Collins deftly illustrates the lingering effects/consequences of her trauma, from Don Chepe and others, and how she carries it with her throughout her life. Even in many of her word choices, such as “scratch the softness” that enables the discomfort, the PTSD flashbacks, the self-hate, to resonate and linger in the full effect of their seeming contradictions, works towards developing an honest portrayal of how disorienting and disorganizing trauma is to get a hold of, in order to have any clear understanding of who one is, what life is, what a person deserves and how to be a functional human being.

*

When Calderón-Collins immigrates to the United States with her parents at age six, and when she’s older, after being deported back to El Salvador, Los Ángeles, the city of immigrants, becomes her home. As a city of contradictions—its natural beauty and the ingrained racism that tinges the residents socio-cultural interactions—it mirrors who she is and welcomes her as is. Being told she’s special as she’s being molested. The city hints at what the second half of the book is about—healing.

It’s here in the suburb of El Monte that she first learns beauty is possible. But it’s a certain kind of beauty. “[H]uge trees and the huge yard…and love is only something for the/pretty girls, the white girls” because it’s “a quiet, perverted city…where a certain type of/immigrant lived/where we lived, this certain type of immigrant.” Quiet, assimilationist. Where Calderón-Collins language shines when she repeats, but rearranges, the two lines about “a certain type of immigrant,” giving this idea new meaning and depth. She rearranges lines several other times with the same success. However, this L.A. flies in the face that certain neighborhoods remind her of the familiar, comforting cultural aspects of El Salvador.

For many different reasons Los Ángeles has always played out as a contradiction, especially for the people who call it home.

Yet, at times, her use of language falters. Her constructions can be awkward, such as “[a] caring tongue burn” when sipping hot chocolate and discussing hypocrisy. Here, Calderón-Collins is again constructing a contradictory image, but instead, when read, it sounds as if the reader stumbles over the language, the flow and rhythm of the verse. However, such occurrences are minor, only briefly taking away from the new and deeper meanings she’s crafting and the comprehension of the poetic narrative.

Calderón-Collins’ healing truly begins when she crafts the image of rebirth, resets her narrative, two-thirds through. “[O]nce upon a time on a warm 9th day,” she begins, now taking active control of her narrative, of her life. Taking control, she reminds the reader and herself, is difficult because “abuse tinges everything.” No interaction is “normal.”

Her true work of understanding herself, from this point to the end, is powerful because her need for it is palpable and her use of language sorts through all the messiness and contradictions in pieces and steps. Gaining confidence from reminding herself that she does deserve the basics of a healthy life: real love by herself and others, the calm of home, of knowing who she is, not what the world says she is.

Calderón-Collins is creating her new “magick.”

Yet, Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole needs to be longer. What would help this “magick” linger, both the old and new, is by inhabiting more of the specifics of her life she already includes, to feel and understand how they shaped, sustained or altered her. Most importantly, Felix Serria Montoya, an El Monte neighbor she calls “a saint,” and “the first man who treated me like/the child I was,” needs to exist in more than one brief section. Don Chepe’s impact lingers, but in what ways does Montoya’s? How, exactly, did he help her survive?

However, Calderón-Collins did more than survive, as a woman, as an immigrant, but most of all, as a human. What so many in L.A. have always done. And by telling her story unapologetically, Calderón-Collins emerges as a complete three-dimensional person. Someone who thrives.

The Trauma of Girlhood and Womanhood: A Review of Elizabeth Hazen's Girls Like Us

If the legacy of a timeless cri-de-coeur out of the depths by women writers has seemed to become redundant in the last twenty-odd years of post-feminism, then Elizabeth Hazen’s poetry collection titled Girls Like Us is the aesthetic equivalent of pushing the finger back into the unhealed wound: the trauma of girlhood and womanhood in this society as in most others. Her poetry brings up into view what is so often swept under the carpet: a dystopic world still uniquely a part of women’s experience because of gender ideologies hardly as moribund as many young women today would like to believe. This is poetry in its best form: ineffable interrogator, ethicist and chronicler of human history.

Hazen, whose first book Chaos Theories was also published by Alan Squire Press in 2016, explores the clot of sexual trauma often connected to the wounds of addiction and mental health issues in young women and girls. In Girls Like Us Hazen doesn’t ‘unflinchingly’ approach these topics. She very much flinches, as a poet with an experiential dimension to her writing might or  will. The pain is there on the surface ; the pain is in black and white ; the pain refuses to be swept under the carpet.

No one would doubt that Hazen came of age when women were re-launching (as women’s movements need to do again and again, there being no rest for the weary) the third wave of feminism in the face of the budding backlash that since then has become a slashing of women’s rights and freedoms.  As testament to the timeliness and resonance of what she has to say, her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, American Literary Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, The Normal School and other journals. In girls like us, the “self” exposed by a language apparently almost bleached of vibrancy swiftly establishes itself as the opposite of “singular.”

Hazen writes in “Why I Love Zombie Women”: “because her need/ is clear, uncomplicated. . . . because she doesn’t stop/ even after the hatchet hacks clean through/ her reaching arm; because she will pursue/ her prey till they have nothing left to chop/ Because when she lies in pieces, inside out/ she will not knew regret, or shame, or doubt”. And this, to compound the fun, is composed as a classic sonnet. Refreshing as Hazen’s wry and rueful engagement with rhymed verse always is, the hardihood she displays in this collection running words around the ring of their own formal antecedents and prohibitions — sonnets are about consuming love, aren’t they? — allows her to hold up the monstrous mirror in which patriarchal representations of femininity can see themselves refracted as who they are.

Still, in the slippage and space between real and representational, Hazen hangs out miracles and wonders like the Himatsu-Bako box whose “emptiness becomes its promise, vast as a blank page”. Also, perhaps the felicitous alignment of her insights with her expressions is rather like the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets who astonished the old world with unimagined similitudes and verisimilitudes plucked out of an unfolding natural world and Natural Philosophy aka Science. Thus, Hazen writes in “Alignment”: “Planets align from time to time, and much/ is made of the effects such cosmic chance/ could have on Earth, though in fact/. . . such coincidence can’t touch/ the craft of carpenters with their dovetail joints/. . . . /And what of the body? . . . .  the problem is my lust’s incongruity with logic. . . ./ I want to rearrange my heart, to alter/the facts, selectively recall — I falter/ fall out of line, think only of his face”. While Hazen’s words do recall sexual trauma familiar to many ‘girls’ living under the ‘Law of the Father,’ it is this very incandescent precision of her language that allows Hazen to fashion with compassionate irony co-dependent worlds of desire and despair: “The moon’s pull is nothing compared to the weight/ of my body sinking into his bed again/ The acceleration of a falling object/ occurs at a constant rate, and repetition/ changes nothing unless conditions change”.

Arrangement of poems is an important thing in this volume; whereas sometimes the poems of Part 1 feel flatly accusatory — note how different is “Blackout is for girls like us/who can be rearranged” from the later poetry cited above — those later poems in Part 2 feel like meat on the bones of the longing to be whole and to heal, living outdoing the bruises of death and love, love of death, and death of love. In the 2nd Part the raw anguish of the hungover fall from grace in “Decisive. Indecisive. He decided” gives way to a wiry wisdom that finally sees that  “We’ve been called so many things that we are not/ we startle at the sound of our own names”. Finally, lines of verse step out and push one hard in the chest, obliging exclamation, pause, reckoning, refamiliarization, resumption. Readers of Elizabeth Hazen can expect long years of magic as well as precision-tool craft with words.

"Bleeding Roses," the poetry of Adeeba Shahid Talukder

Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, is Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s first full-length poetry collection. As the author states in her preface, all the poetry contained in the book occurs “in dialogue” with the Urdu tradition of Ghazal, which Talukder has studied and translated for years. 

“Dialogue” pertinently defines the complex interplay of Talukder’s creation with its literary sources. Such meeting takes a number of forms, from translated or rather “transcreated” quotes to reinventions of entire poems, from tributes to famous authors to the borrowing of traditional characters, imagery and tropes. 

The universe of Ghazal freely and fluently inhabits the page, self-deciphering as the reader proceeds, without need for punctual explanation. Although, at the end of the book the author clarifies her references, giving context to the authors she quotes as well as to the characters that she borrows from them. To revisit the book after reading the final notes is a different and worthy experience.

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But what really counts is obviously the first reading, the one before the notes. Ghazal originated in 7th century within the Arab tradition, later spreading to Persia, Turkey, and the entire Indian continent. Its theme is unrequited love, as a combination of shrill pleasure and unbearable suffering, with its trail of grief and insanity. It is the kind of love we find in the Song of Songs, in all mystical literature and, slightly tamed, in Medieval Courtly lyrics. The language describing it is quintessentially ecstatic, inextricably mixing the spiritual and the sensual, an explosive collusion of carnal and divine.

“Shar-e-jaanaan” is bravely themed after this type of love, which Talukder lets detonate through the pages, allowing it to bounce back and forth a thousand of years, across continents and civilizations, without losing a drop of intensity.  

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The book is articulated in sections titled after Ghazal tropes such as wine, the nightingale, chains, dancing courtesans, the tearing of the clothes, and more. Characters and motifs, though, don’t abide by such grouping. They make loops, go underground and reemerge, circulate at leisure, as if those partitions were loosely drawn Tarot cards, ready to be shuffled again.

The imagery Talukder sifts from Ghazal and then makes her own truly recalls ancient Tarots, even sharing their colors (red, black, white and gold), as well as it evokes European folktales, which of course weren’t European to start with. They condensed East and West as they gathered, preserved and passed down a legacy of symbols drawn from the collective psyche.

The echoes of those tales, not even consciously acknowledged, amply enable the western reader to appreciate “Shahr-e-jaanaan” without mediation.

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For example, the opening poem, a prelude to all sections, coming back in a different version at the end of section v, deals with reaching womanhood with all that such passage entails. As she realizes she no longer can “wait to be beautiful,” the poem’s speaker pushes “bangles upon bangles” onto her wrist, rubbing her “hands raw with metal and glass.”

Each time a bangle broke, I watched
the blood at my veins
with a grim face
feeling more like a woman.

If the wrist is a trope of Ghazal poetry, symbolizing, the author explains, female fragile elegance, so are bangles, dancers’ most typical ornaments. But the association of female pre-nuptial adornment with self-mutilation is practically universal, as is the ambivalence of desire for sex and abhorrence for the loss of freedom and integrity implied by marriage.

So the blood profusely spilled throughout Shahr-e-jaanaan, namely or else in the shape of scattered rose petals (a literal, constant “defloration”), rusty leaves, henna stains, is both menstrual blood and blood of lost virginity, the same bled by all little mermaids when their tail is split into legs. We easily recognize it.

Moreover, wrists like ankles are to the human psyche portals through which bad and good enter our core in order to heal or destroy it, and the same is true for the neck from which Majnoon, a Ghazal character to whom Talkuder devotes many poems, repeatedly tears his collar, shedding basic protection, making himself a pray because of despair. Majnoon is the fool, the one who has lost his reason for love.

And the bangle, the bracelet, is just the first loop of the chain it stands for, the signifier of slavery.

From section viii, “God-shaped Woman”.

… To be a slave:
the pull of light,

the chain’s idle
bind.

So the love addressed by Ghazal poetry, Petrarch’s sonnets, mystic literature, great Romantic novels, the Song of Songs, and by Talkuder, wounds or exacts self-wounding, forces its way into the heart, maddens and enslaves.

It’s a passion we are unable to negotiate because we are too young (it is love seen by the adolescent as the fate life will force upon her) or because our psyche was crushed within the jaws of some binary, smashed by the irreconcilability of pleasure and guilt, gain and loss, want and fear.

Such tornado has multiple facets, some more pleasant than others, as it implies fusional stages and the exhilarating blur of self-boundaries, as it swings between the polarities of rejected suitor and omnipotent beloved, which of course are two sides of the same coin, a mirrored reality.

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Shahr-e-jaanaan isn’t afraid of exploring contrasting refractions, as if perhaps an ultimate meaning could spring forth from their constant shuffling. What certainly emerges is a questioning of the whole mythology, a deep, open meditation made of shattered fragments, as if the poet had first smashed a mirror and then randomly picked shards, holding them to the light for readers to see what each reflects, finally recreating their own vision.

In the first poem of the book, the bangles have “no symmetry or sequence.” Their colors are “bright, jeweled, and dissonant”.

From “Kathak: The Dance of the Courtesans:”

… You, fragile
as glass, will learn:

you were made       to break.

Should a poem be selected to epitomize the collection, a sound choice would be “When in the dark / my mind brightened.”  It begins the book with striking imagery, gathering in one take the cruel rite of passage later articulated section by section. It brilliantly returns at midway, and dialogues with itself.

Also the title poem, which alone forms section vi, would be a natural choice. It describes the speaker’s admission into a mental ward, following a breakout that turns into a breakdown. Here as elsewhere, Ghazal verse and tropes seamlessly meet the present tense, traveling at the speed of light from remote ages to the now, instantly incarnated, made flesh.

My personal choice is “On Courting Calamity,” a brief poem found in section iv. Rather than exemplifying motifs, it highlights the book’s modus operandi and deeper intent. It expresses a need for joining extremes, such as an old tradition endowed with immense beauty but carrying a mortifying ideology, and a present where the ideology no more applies but the beauty deserves to live. It yearns for reconciling opposites in general, those antinomies that if not harmonized lead to insanity, such as the desire to be loved and the fear of being annihilated, the compulsion of abiding by the myths of beauty and simultaneously denying them. These conflicts are explored throughout Talukder’s verse and they materialize in the body, which they inhabit and haunt, pulling it apart, tearing at its core, unless words find the power to extend themselves over the chasm, to bridge through.

A thread

from pre-

eternity

to past time’s

end, a thread

that binds

movement

to gesture, a crow

to a narcissus.

I stretch.

My waist, this morning,

is a knot.