Somewhere Between Soaring and Plunging: A Review of Richard Cole’s SONG OF THE MIDDLE MANAGER

“I didn’t expect I would fall in love with [Song of the Middle Manager] . . . . In fact, I wanted to dislike it.” This quote struck me as sort of egregious given it came from the judge of Grayson Books’ Poetry Contest, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, regarding Richard Cole’s winning book of poems. She wanted to dislike it? Her words seemed like a harsh discrimination, even for a judge . . . until I began reading the poems myself. Then I, too, found myself reacting quite itchingly to the sometimes simple diction and the repetition of a few clichéd images and words (the word beautiful and its many derivatives are incessantly used). Then, suddenly, like Trommer, I fell in love.

It happened when I wasn’t looking. Unlike Trommer, I didn’t want to dislike the book, but I live my days in the corporate world, and I kept wondering how this poet was going shake me up emotionally using the mundane humdrum of corporate life. How could Cole make music out of what I found so uninspirational every day? However, the more I read, I discovered Song of the Middle Manager is not just about corporate America. The forty-two poems in this collection are an amalgam of corporate, artistic, and blue-collar labor. Cole writes about dreamers (“Every unremarkable donut shop/is somebody’s act of faith”), investors, managers, and workers. He covers the celebrations and utter catastrophes of every kind of business—from the building of the Egyptian pyramids to the deadly tragedy of Deepwater Horizon (“steel/groaning as the burning platform/drops to its knees”). Cole himself indicates the book is, “about work and the human spirit, about the sacrifice and gain we can find in the business world, our daily lives, and the labor of creation.” As such, Song of the Middle Manager is as much a work of simplicity as it is a complex illustration of the relationship between humans and our work.

A deep dive into the poems uncovers exquisitely quiet truths about “work and the human spirit,” written in the same simple manner as Ted Kooser’s unpretentious, straightforward poems. However, with Cole’s poems, there exists a dual nature, exemplified throughout the book in the way Cole moves from comfort to chaos in a back and forth, yo-yo like motion. Just when you expect the yo-yo to return again, it slams straight into the ground. I can be reading one poem comfortably, quite unassumingly, and then without warning, “The sky is filled with brokers jumping from windows,” having a “love affair/with gravity.” I’m undone. For a long time. It takes me longer than it should to recover from that image, from those words. Only a skilled poet can evoke these feelings consistently: soft lull of comfort, emotional explosion, rest and recovery, rinse and repeat. Cole’s poetic expertise lies in this playful back and forth of the yo-yo and the yo-yo’s purposeful destruction. As evidence, threaded throughout the poems is a recurrence of people and objects soaring through the sky and then plummeting to the ground. Indeed, in “Song Without Words” Cole asserts,

Let us have poems
that cough, sputter
and soar like kites or plunge
to the ground, dragged
and helpless until they rise again
or not. . .

I expect the kite, soaring with ease and ecstasy, to come back to me, whole. Instead, it plunges to the ground. It may or may not rise again. Somewhere between that soaring and plunging, there exists a realization of instability that symbolizes the largely typical feelings of being part of corporate America where, while things might appear stable, many times there is an underlying fear of being bought or sold. The “earth [could] drop. . . . away” and “the corporate body [be] reorganized.” In this teetering state, one is never on sure footing.

To further illustrate this disorienting duality—this push and pull—Cole reminds us with every poem what it means to be human, then reminds us what it’s like to be one cog in the wheel of a massive machine. In “Perfect Corporations,” he asserts, “Corporations are people, too,/ numbers with skin.”  In “Chapter Eleven,” “The copy machines/ start thumping like combines, spewing out projects, and management/ scrambles in a frenzy, trimming the fat, throwing out bodies, beating the/ drums, and the VPs slam down their phones and roar to themselves in/ silence.” This kind of imagery in a book that also celebrates buying “smooth clean planks” of lumber at Home Depot and making jewelry out of “junk and abandon, out of busted/ nickel,” lets me know I can’t put my guard down with Cole. He’s capable of frightful (or delightful) surprises around any corner. 

While some of these surprises may be macabre, Cole is not without humor or heart. For instance, “Firing the Poem” succinctly reflects, in way that is both snarky and poignant, the vernacular used by managers to let employees go. When the manager says to the poem, “We want to treat you like a human being/even though you’re not,” Cole insinuates that employees often feel less than while sitting across from a person of power. The entire poem is filled with this back and forth of what it means to be human and what it feels like to be treated otherwise. The poem’s ending is not so much an exclamation point as it is a simple resonating truth:

. . . and you’re free to go. Security
will walk you to the door.
I wish you the best,
and be careful out there. I mean that.
You were always a stranger.

The poem that got fired is now simultaneously one thing (free) as well as another (jobless). This dual nature reinforces the symbolic back and forth yo-yo motion as well as that plummeting splat that Cole is so good at. Further, we know that the poem is not human, which makes the subtle humor palatable, and we chuckle, but Cole’s personifying the poem makes the last line so powerfully sad. 

Song of the Middle Manager is ultimately two things: a mirror reflecting a dual human nature and a complex study of our relationship to our labor, our employers, and our physical and artistic creations. I began this journey not expecting to be emotionally moved. Had I given up after the first two “beautifuls” I would not have experienced the next sixteen iterations nor reached the conclusion that it’s not that Cole doesn’t know any other word for beautiful; rather, he’s “making an art of bittersweet discouragements.” So, overlook the few simple quirks and go with Cole wherever his poems take you; he’s painting a specific picture for you: “On one side the ocean, on the other the storm, like a painting that’s alive in a wonderful, terrible way.” Both the ocean and the storm are beautiful.

Poetry Is All That Wires Us Together: A Conversation with Garrett Caples about LOVERS OF TODAY

Garrett Caples is a poet and writer. He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco. Lovers of Today feature poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining.

Tiffany Troy: Why name your collection after a bar? How does the title poem, “Lovers of Today” open the door to your collection?

Garrett Caples: Ultimately, it’s really naming it after a poem, because that’s the title of the poem. And that was probably the first thing I wrote in the book because my last book came out in 2016, and I wrapped it up maybe a year before. “Lovers Of Today” is the newest of the new batch.

It’s a cool title and that’s a title of this poem and it was an exciting poem to write. But the poem got the title from the bar, and the bar—ultimately, it’s from a Pretenders song. At a certain point, I listened to the song to make sure everything is okay. It’s a good song.

There’s a reason why you can’t copyright titles, because they circulate in these different ways. It’s kind of more of the poem, but it was an earlier part of the book. I get married in the middle of the book. So the early part of the book is certainly about a type of bachelorhood.

It’s just a good title. I tried some other titles, and it didn’t really come off. It’s the first line of the first poem, too. I used to be very against that idea of having the first line of a poem be the title. But when I come up with these little prejudices about poetry, I try to break them. I make myself do things that I don’t like and ask what do I do with that.

I always didn’t like taking a book title from a poem. It’s just more real estate to have fun with. None of my other books had a title poem. This is the first one. I did that partly to push against my own prejudices.

Tiffany Troy: I think that’s so cool and wonderful. Especially with the epigraph by Alli Warren: “I enjoy my drink, but not enough to name a book after a bar!” Right after, you have your title poem. Sometimes you really can believe two things at once, which really goes to how you go against your little prejudices.

I loved how your poems are rooted in place, in New York, California, Russia, and travel to these places. I see the surreal and how everyday observances in your poems become strange and beautiful, like with the onion-shaped dome or your dream about Ra. Could you speak to your writing process?

Garrett Caples: I am very much of a collect-the-poems-when-they-are-done type of poet. I don’t worry about having enough poems for a book in advance. Inevitably, books have their own personalities to them. It’s neat in a way because on the one hand, putting out a book artificially stops whatever you are doing. You might be on a roll in this way, and just out of necessity, tie a knot. There is something kind of artificial about that process vis-à-vis your own creative processes, so sometimes you like think a book correspond to more natural rhythm of where you’re like.

In terms of how the poems all relate to each other, it’s just where I’m at in a given point. But I keep on changing. If I start to get into a thing, where I’m like a certain sort of poem, I just get bored. I don’t want to have a style. In a way, the poems declare their own style and their own form. In my earlier books, there was a lot of formal striving that’s all gone now. I just figure it out as I go along and it declares its own format. I never have to think about it too much anymore, which can be good or bad. I look at some of my early books that I find kind of amazing. But because they were so formally driven and that’s relaxed, I just become more of a human being, I suppose. I just am a poet now so I just don’t worry in making individual pieces of art.

Tiffany Troy: My next question is directly tied to being attuned to being a poet. Do your poems find their form or vice versa? I am wondering if you could describe how the poems find their form?

Garrett Caples: It’s one of those things that’s almost different every time. Discussions of process break down because I don’t think I have a process. On some level, each poem has its own thing. Each one feels like a painting. It has its own life. I don’t have a process as such: a lot of it is that I just get irritated with myself.

My poems tend to hew to the left-hand margin. Ultimately, as creative as you can be with layout, ultimately you should be able to do it with no layout. The form of the poem “Lovers of Today,” is ultimately about forcing myself away from the left-hand margin. The way it came through with that poem, in a certain way it’s the feel of the trip I was on in New York, which lent itself to it. I went to New York a million times, but it was a particularly exciting trip.

There is a line from a John Lennon song “New York City.” “Que pasa New York” is a line from that song. That song had that kind of feel too. A London guy in New York and loving it and being blown away. It wasn’t a new thing, just like it wasn’t new thing for him either. He wrote the song in the 1970’s, and he’d already been to New York a bunch. But you can be there and suddenly the city just opens up in great ways. I was trying to get some of that headiness into the poem and have it swirl in that way.

There aren’t that many of these types of poems in the book. Ultimately, though, poetry shouldn’t depend too heavily on layout. I’m trying to get the words down and not worry about the layout so much.

That said, layout for me is a lot about line breaks. There’s so much action in my short line poems, that I do not feel the need to scatter words all over the page. The break itself is doing the work. That got weird on me in this book. In the poems, “Emotional Rescue” or “Hairy Sniff,” some lines started breaking in the middle of words. It sounds silly but it wasn’t a conscious decision, but that’s how it came whenever I tap into when I am writing poem. For those poems, I would practice reading them to make sure I remember how the syntax goes vis-à-vis the line breaks.

The way I became a poet ultimately was realizing that poems are just sentences laid out a certain way. I’m always working on setting the syntax against the line break. I’m not reinventing the wheel there, but that’s how I figured how to be a poet at all. Realizing that I knew how to write good sentences and use that against line breaks what you’re doing for line break. Sometimes, the line breaks are just deeply motivated and sometimes it’s just size, and you are just making a column of some sort.

Tiffany Troy: Thank you for sharing that eureka moment with us, the idea of writing sentences and tapping into the poet inside of you and doing the line breaks as they go. Something that I love about your collection is the rambunctiousness of your voice that is at once complex and wry with humor. Could you speak about how you construct and maintain this voice?

Garrett Caples: The voice is the whole thing really, on a certain level. I don’t have any problems with that. Maybe I should have greater ambitions.

I write a great deal of conventional, exposition prose, like for let’s say the New York Times. But unless I’m not allowed to, I have to write in first person.  It’s not like it’s one voice either. You make different voices with it. I realized that so much of what’s compelling about the literary experience is ultimately not the stories or the plot or anecdotes or the sentiment even of poetry, it’s the way of talking and finding a compelling way to put things.

We’re in a cultural movement where there’s not much to do in terms of formal innovation even though I studied a lot of modernist poetry and it’s all modernist innovation. But it’s almost all been tried at a certain point, and so, what’s the next thing after that? I don’t have an answer to that, except I know as an editor of poetry as well as a writer and reader, I just need the poetry to not sound like everyone else. There’s a lot of poetry that is pretty good and accomplished, but it all sound the same. I’ve heard that sound before.

It’s probably hard to have any kind of real perspective on your own poetry, but I don’t think anybody’s poetry sounds like mine. And I feel that in this cultural moment, that’s the measure of becoming a poet, if it sounds like you and there’s no other person you can slot in there. For the poets that I really admire, that’s just the case: you won’t be able to mistake one poet for another poet.

Tiffany Troy: I think that is exactly right. And that’s what community building, gathering, and celebration are all about, which are the different voices and what makes us different.

Garrett Caples: But there’s a lot of pressure to conform at the same time. The poetry community tends to favor a certain range of individuality and so you’ve got to push back against that. Because of the MFA system, so much poetry comes through that system. So inevitably, there is certain amounts of homogenization that goes on. I’m not knocking that world because many of my friends and people I admire come through that. But you’ve got to figure out how to get through it and break out of it.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I became a poet. I just knew I wanted to be a writer, and I found myself studying to become a professor at Berkeley. I wasn’t really interested in becoming a professor, and I just didn’t know how you can become a writer at all. So even though I did finish the degree but I abandoned the profession. But I don’t regret getting this PhD, because it got me out to San Francisco, you know, and put me in a writers’ town. For poetry, I feel like, besides New York, it’s the best town to be a writer in. San Francisco’s got such a center of gravity and literary tradition to it, and it still maintains that character even in this Silicon Valley age. So much poetry of great import of the second half of the 20th century originates here.

I was lucky because I didn’t really know this and went to Berkley because it was a highly-ranked grad school. I went to Rutgers as an undergrad, but they were all very bad. They wrote mainstream, hip stuff, and I just wasn’t hip enough to know where in New York you could get some good poetry. I stumbled through the English department at Berkley and that led to the rest of my life.

My other poet friends, like Jackson Meazle from Little Rock, Arkansas went to San Francisco State and Micah Ballard went to the University of Louisiana in Lafayetteas an undergrad but used that to become a grad student at New College of California. Both of them came to San Francisco because San Francisco is the poetry mecca, and they already knew that. I just stumbled out here and got lucky.

Tiffany Troy: I really love that story and isn’t everyone so excited about San Francisco. Your poems have this specific sense of humor that also cuts against yourself. It’s self-deprecating but at the same time you also glow.

What are some themes in your collection in your collection? What do you want the reader to get out of it?

Garrett Caples: This book is a funny book because part of is I’m pushing 50 and people start to die on you, especially if you are in the arts. You meet people at the top of the mountain, they are old people, and they die. Philip Lamantia was like 71 when we met and I was probably 26 or 27. But it’s what I love about poetry: there is so much intergenerational hanging out that I find very stimulating among the poets in San Francisco, Some of the people who I’ve met have been the most important and the greatest experiences of my life.

But if you’re any good at all, a real poet can see that. You get access to the top people in poetry quickly in a way that doesn’t happen in other more money-driven art scenes, because there’s no money in here. You get to hang out with Ashberry and Creeley as a young man. I was good enough that I could do it.

There’s a lot of deaths in the book, and at one point I thought about calling the book, Death. But it didn’t quite fit. The death material is fairly celebratory, and I try to speak of the people who meant the world to me. Some of the people are very old too, but it almost makes it worse when someone really old dies because you just get so used to relying on them being there. It doesn’t feel better when the person is in the 70’s or 80’s when they die than if somebody younger dies. It’s not a book about COVID, but it fits this time because it has this undercurrent of dying to it.

The last piece in the book, “Soul Book” is a poem I wrote for an art book called People Are a Light to Love: Memorial Drawings, 2004–2016. The artist, Veronica DeJesus, was a San Francisco artist who is now in LA. She worked at a well-known bookstore called Dog Eared Books. When somebody personally connected to her or a famous person that she was interested in would die, she would do a memorial drawing and stick them in the window. Over the course of several years, Veronica ended up doing around 300 drawings. She was looking for someone to write a text for her art book that wasn’t essay, but creative. So I wrote a sample, the first two or three paragraphs based on her drawings. It’s a first-person sentence for every drawing. The piece appeared as prose paragraphs in People Are a Light to Love. Then, for Lovers of Today, my editor at Wave, Joshua Beckman, suggested splitting the paragraphs into individual lines, which gave a second life to the piece as a long poem. It’s all about death, because all the photos are based on someone dying.  

There’s obvious overlap in our tastes. But Vernoica and I come from very different places and with different lives, so she had plenty of figures in there I knew nothing about. I would read around about X, Y or Z person until like some sort of luminous detail emerged and put it in the poem. That was a years’-long process of hers, and we published our book pre-COVID. But it feels like for this time because it feels like we’ve gone through so much death.

The book’s last poem or two before the long poem were from the very beginning of the pandemic. I was actually in France when the pandemic happened, doing my first and thus far only writing residency. I was in France at the time, in February and March of 2020. In mid-March 2020, I had to leave very suddenly. The last few poems are set in France and then ends in San Francisco.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today and do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: I’m always working on something. I’m an editor at City Lights, so I do a lot of other people’s books. To me, being a poet gives you permission to apply yourself to any literary endeavor. Sometimes that means editing somebody’s book, and sometimes that means writing your own book.

Since I finished writing the collection, I’ve done a McMclore book at City Lights. During the pandemic, I wrote around 7 prose pieces that I’m trying to see if I can turn into a book. I don’t want to think of it as a book of commercial fiction, because it doesn’t have anything to do with that. I think of them as fables or parables. I would like to publish with a poetry press and not worry about that.

Tiffany Troy: Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: What I’m trying to do as a poet and editor of poetry as I do a contemporary poetry series in City Lights is to try to maintain the integrity of collections of lyric poetry. There’s at least one school of avant-garde thought that lyric poetry is retrograde, and they are incorrect. The books I publish at Spotlight are hard to market, because I pick poets who can write good poems, and I avoid project-oriented poetry for the most part. Project-oriented poetry is easier to market and come up with clever things to say about them. There are a lot of poets out there, but ultimately you are only as good as a one-page poem. If your poem depends too much on sequential, serial stuff, I’m skeptical. There’s plenty of great poetry like that, so I’m not trying to make a blanket announcement.

What I’m trying to do is to carve out a space for real lyric poetry. I still feel like I publish avant-garde poetry. There’s no contradiction between lyric and avant-garde. That’s the type of thing I’m up to. The great bits of poetry are microscopic, so you want to preserve the arena that happens in versus all the pressures to write a book. It’s all ambition-driven, and not driven by the poem. I’m trying to do things where the poem is driving everything you do. It might hurt you career-wise, but you have to not care about that and think about the art.

Bird of Ashes and Fire: Toti O'Brien reviews SURVIVING HOME by Katerina Canyon

“Here is my pain,” says a poem from Katerina Canyon’s newest collection, Surviving Home. “Consume it.” And it ends, “Then do absolutely nothing.”

Canyon’s pain, stark naked and shining, is what the book unveils for the reader. Without a single doubt, it’s a pain that inherently resists consumption. It’s the pain of the Phoenix, bird of ashes and fire, lava and resurrection, introduced as Canyon’s spirit-animal in a poem that adds to the intensity permeating all verses a sudden, bright vein of humor. This Phoenix has short, black feathers and looks like a stubborn chicken, pecks at bugs and roosts on the windowsill of a hospital room. Where else should a Phoenix be? Barely reborn, yet soon bound to burn again—as like Icarus, she can’t help flying towards the sun—it isn’t someone’s chimera. It is the real thing.

So, what does resurrect from its own ashes? Is it the poet? The poetry? Is it memory? Is it pain itself? I believe what is meant to stay is the inextricable mesh the book is made of, the tight tapestry of suffering and resilience, experience and reflection, witnessing and rebellion.

“Here is my pain,” Canyon writes, and there’s a holy echo to her words, as if she were hoisting a calyx and saying, “this is my blood.” The same biblical quality is found in the first poem, “Involuntary Endurance.” Since the opening lines, “My story is not one revealed with chapter / And verse. It is expressed in blood and bone,” a new genesis is announced. The word becomes flesh.

Sparsely, yet throughout the book, the poet carries a conversation with the kind of god who is a white, male, supposedly loving father. The dialogue is a peer-to-peer exchange. Canyon doesn’t forgive this god who allows pain to be widely and unevenly distributed. She looks straight in his eye, unafraid to let him know she doesn’t abide by his rule. As the book proceeds, we feel that the balance between human and divine shifts, that the girl who talks back to god wins the argument, takes things into her hands. And we trust her. It is she that we now believe. There’s a holiness to this poetry collection, as boldly and blatantly secular as it is. A profound, human holiness.

What pain is this? Societal gravity funnels pain so that the heaviest burden weighs on black women. Even more, depending on when and where they are born. Add childhood, and you’ve got the vantage point from which Canyon writes. So the pain she refers to is the agony endured by the square inch of skin, the inch cube of female/black bone that supports in its whole the magma of the world.

Still, with the sheer honesty that is her true signature, the poet manages to shun the spotlight, identifying a locus of more suffering. In one of the indelible poems she devotes to her younger brother, she talks about whiplashes. “I just remember / Twitching as is each crack were / Against my back

But they were not. I am just a witness.
I hover through storms and report
The heat index of memories.

Father’s whip stopped when the scream of the child stopped. This is the brother to whom the book is dedicated, the boy who’s locked inside a closet all day when he howls his bothering “rabbit scream.” The elder sister is sent in as well, “as a sedative.” The routine is narrated in a poem that is central to the book both physically and metaphorically. The dark closet where the siblings are bundled and confined is a womb in which—like the phoenix—they will find a way of being reborn. Rather, to re-create the world they unwillingly were born into. It is the alchemic athanor allowing them to transform the one thing on which they have control: their perception. Their imagination. There, in captive suspension, paradoxically they will find inner freedom. They will turn the world on its hinges, like an afterimage, and decide the cell in which they are entombed is an open, luminous immensity.

Perhaps.

Father-with-the-lash, father closet, father shark, father snake has no mercy and the book has no mercy on him, yet doesn’t pronounce verdicts. Father is a dispenser of pain, a main instrument of pain, yet a vehicle too, as pain passing through his hands is bigger than he is, and comes from further back, elsewhere.

Also strength and resilience come from far. Among Canyon’s most moving poems are those highlighting vertical legacy, the lesson of black women from the past (“Sojourner”) and especially the mother-daughter, mother-son bonds. From “Playing with Roses”:

Your talent resides
somewhere within me

Memory is enough
to make it bloom
[…]
We are daughter and mother
Bound by the same sanguine root

From “Before God”:

When you cried, I nursed
you in bitter milk.
Breaching through secrets,
you asked
if I ever wanted you.

Shouting through clouds
My son, I wanted you
before my own birth,

Before first sword cut to stone.
Bathe in my tears, my blood
Know that I wanted you
Before God.

Love legacy is so deeply felt and expressed, it seems to imperceptibly lift the overwhelming weight of abuse. At least show another path, another perspective.

A few poems touch at language in interesting ways. From “Scrabble”:

[…]                 Some letters are

worth more than others. Some words
worthless, as the tiles reveal.

[…]
When it’s over, I’m left with a blank.

A long conversational poem (“I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’”) enumerates words and expressions coeval with the poet’s birth (from “magnet school” to “assault weapon”, from “black-on-black” to “delegitimize”)—a smart, subtle way to show how heavily an era-and-society’s clichés affect those they directly concern.  

In a similar way, this collection made me ponder a trope of our present time—“trigger”—all too naturally associated with Canyon’s powerful poems. Content triggers. I am often perplexed by their practical application, but this book made me doubt the concept itself. Made me ask how legitimate “triggers” are, when it comes to poetry. When it comes to this.

She says, “Here is my pain.”

Look and listen. Then, let it resonate.

An Element of Blank: Cynie Cory Reviews TENSION : RUPTURE by Cutter Streeby and Michael Haight

Tension : Rupture is a hybrid collaboration of poems and paintings by Cutter Streeby and Michael Haight whose borders dissolve into liminalities. The performance is often hypnotic and dreamlike, an Aurora Borealis whose shapes and colors shift across the page. Tension : Rupture asks the reader to participate in the interstitial spaces where the drama of the poem/paintings unfold. Here, the reader becomes the third collaborator as she deep dives into the re/construction of history. This mindscape is precisely where memory and self (identity) are interrogated. The triumph of Tension : Rupture is also its subject: performance.

As a title, Tension : Rupture, behaves as a poem within a poem, in the sense that it both reveals and mirrors the collection’s form and content; specifically, its dramatic unfolding and ambiguity. Its architectonics create an impending action. If we look more closely, we see a gathering of moments between the action of undoing and the undoing itself. (Think pin pulled from a grenade.) The juxtaposition of its discordant words is set to discharge. It is the space around the colon that charges the moment. The colon is the force that propels a thought or word forward. “Tension” is disrupted by white space which halts the action that the colon creates. Time elasticates. This is a profound moment of violence. The title further subverts our expectations by creating the action of holding together that which is falling apart.

When Hamlet is poised to say his soliloquy(s) the audience is compelled to listen because we sense that 1) he will reveal a point of action that will further the plot and/or 2) that he will reveal himself. Shakespeare complicates this dramatic structure by inviting the audience to eavesdrop (participate) on Hamlet’s soliloquy(s) thereby creating the unexpected interlocutor. We are compelled to listen to the Dane’s inner workings because they are both inner and workings. This is similarly so in the Streeby/Haight book where private also meets public. Hamlet’s words reveal, in real time, the intimate action of self-interrogation as does the interface of Streeby and Haight’s collision.

The shared liminalities reveal both the violence of the collision of text and self/alterity and in exploring/excavating this history. We may think of this book as a poetics of trauma as we may also see Hamlet as a play of trauma. Yet in Hamlet, one may argue, there is no redemption. Here, in this intertextual world of unmerciful searching for identity, one has the sense that Streeby wishes he could circumvent words altogether – one feels and sees the pressure placed on meaning – because words do not “say to say”: they do not and cannot alone tell the truth. In their tireless pursuit of truth telling, Streeby and Haight use the page not so much as canvas but as twilight, where the gaps between light and dark and between memory and imagination are places of ruin and revelation.

An Ever Present Love: A Review of The Breath by Cindy Savett

It is said that to lose a child is to lose the future. But just a few pages in, this collection of poems, these illuminated memories and imaginings convinced me that Cindy Savett’s daughter was not lost to her when she died at the age of eight all those years ago. As long as Rachel “… lingers, sounds out / the curvatures of my breath / with her phantom tongue…” then she is as real as ever, her all too brief existence immortalised in the souls of those who loved her. And with that love, you feel their future is assured.

The Breath is a series, an arrangement of stuttering emotion and almost mythical imagery summoning the poet’s departed child and relating her sorrow in an even and considered way which only magnifies its intensity. It is both a quiet release of anguish and a heightened recollection, skillfully composed and with an overwhelming honesty that urges you on to discover more about Rachel and her abiding presence.

A mother’s love is a mother’s love and is unfathomable, but of course the whole family carries the burden of such a devastating impact on their lives, each experiencing and coping with it in their own way. Savett gives us fleeting impressions of their responses, including the son who “… grips the whispers / around him, listens for the dead child and the stories / she once told him.” and the surviving daughter “clothed in the needles of old love.” Her husband Rob features prominently throughout; his strength and support, the unfailing and unconditional love he provides, as well as his own grief, are recorded touchingly. These four lines, from the poem “Of Rob,” are a nice illustration of just that:

Rob, iron weaver,
binds us down to the dirt,
loosens the acres
inside my breath.

As individuals, as a couple, as a household, Cindy, Rob, Alison and Sean are necessarily reconstructed by force of circumstance; their history, their very DNA adjusted to cope since Rachel’s leaving; since they:

… were a house
with sinking beams, set apart
from the many.

Within these pages, the work of a born poet, are what might be called momentary poems, poems of the here and now like entries in a diary which document Rachel’s reappearances over time, along with meditations and a kind of philosophical searching. The whole is a dignified lament and a potent, a near hypnotic insistence of the child’s continued presence. What appeals is the utter artlessness of the poetry: there is nothing contrived or mannered here; everything is natural, and the desired aim of conveying the heartache and the love is achieved purely through sincerity and candour. Every poem in the collection succeeds in doing just that. Consider the following, called “Faded, Rachel, Gone”:

When you fled
I threw out the bedclothes
and your shuddering scent, you

were the watchgirl who lay beside me
and split dawn’s light from the dark.

Me, aimless
dwarfed by your single last gasp.

There is a guileless sensitivity, an unselfconscious openness in these lines, where each word feels natural and right, serving to highlight the awful reality of the moment. That “shuddering scent” is almost unbearable.

Cindy Savett, who teaches poetry workshops in psychiatric hospitals, has previously published a full-length collection of poetry about Rachel, Child in the Road, so why another now, fourteen years later? The answer is abundantly clear in each of these manifestations of the girl’s continued reality. Rachel still breathes, still visits her mother, her father, the unfortunate siblings starting out in life with both the blessing and the pain of their sister’s memory, and Savett is eager to preserve these moments. Perhaps even obliged to do so. I can imagine that it took a good deal of thought deciding to share them with an unknowing public, but I applaud her courage in doing so; indeed, I am grateful for it.

The sweet memories, the comforting reminders and the very act of realising her daughter’s existence still, are positive and are generously sprinkled throughout, but unsurprisingly the tone is overwhelmingly that of sadness, a quiet melancholy no better expressed perhaps than in this rather piteous poem titled “Sublime”:

I track you, my endlessly dying daughter,
for the shadow in your breath, ragged prize
drawn from your mouth to mine,

and pin you shaken and pulsing
to the dirt. I stumble over
pieces of your gray iron coat

to my hour that howls,
my burying shovel twisted, my home
overrun by your hollow eyes.

This collection, without doubt the most affecting I’ve read for a very long time, is divided into what the author terms incantations, (and I can’t think of a better word to describe the ritualistic nature of the language used, the repetition, the weight attached to certain images) the last of which is but a single poem. It’s an intense summing-up of Rachel and consists of a series of epithets describing her “used-to-be-girl”, each followed by a figurative finger to the lips and a plaintive “silence”. It’s a prayer, an invocation, a quite beautiful calling out to her absent child.   

It’s not my place as a reviewer to comment directly on the personal tragedies and consolations of a poet, although it’s almost impossible in this case not to, but it is my job to evaluate the work resulting from them. Do the poems convey the reactions to those experiences in such a way as to draw the reader in, to give the reader insights, revelations of bare truth, that a more prosaic recording could not? Well, in respect of this equally powerful and tender collection, I can answer emphatically yes. Cindy Savett has let us in on her and her family’s grief, their strength, their togetherness with good grace and astonishing candour, and I believe that, as readers, we are all the better for it.

Poetic Explorations of the Chaos We Create: A Review of Kristin Bock's Glass Bikini

There is a world where art has become extinct. In this place, we search aimlessly for some sense of wonder, losing ourselves in the chaos we create. In this absence of art, perhaps we create monsters to fill the void, to at least feel some bit of emotion from the hordes of creatures scratching and clawing at the empty spaces left over. This is the world of Glass Bikini, a new poetry collection by Kristin Bock that brings a premonition of the future through prose poems that craft a world filled with bouquets of rifles, rabbits taking over the world, and monsters with soldiers pouring from them.

In Bock’s alternate universe, we are immersed in a carnival ride that questions and interprets how our current reality could easily follow a much darker timeline. In this world of monsters and chaos, happening “after the extinction of whales”, in which trees as nourishers become murderous “flame trees”, we are instantly and viscerally reminded of the fires that have ravaged Australia, the Amazon, and much of the western United States. And where fire once may have signaled a renewal of forests and the promise of rebirth, we are now trapped in a purgatory of flame and destruction brought about by ignorance and indifference. Throughout the book, Bock weaves the narrative as a poetic comparison of our reality through a desolate and detached, voyeuristic observer as we are left to piece together a clarity and identity while surrounded by a dystopic tempest. In Bock’s world, it is the poet that speaks truth, which resides in a cascade of words that thrust us directly into the chaotic despair of a world on fire, the awe of monstrous intentions, and the dystopic visions that exist in our everyday lives.

However, Bock’s work is not a simple metaphor that one can easily identify and say ‘Ah yes, this is our future. Let us be sad.’ Rather, like our actual world, the truth is much more ephemeral and everything that takes place is often beyond our grasp. This is especially resonant in how she evokes the crucified feminine that society has sought for millennia to control, while invoking questions about a broader responsibility to a suffering earth. In these moments, Bock brings the best poetic intentionality through an invitation to the true monsters of the world; an invitation to come and find a place in the nothing that is left, with the poet more than suggesting these monsters may fit in just fine in the world we are creating.

“Come bomb cookers, come poison makers, come girl biters, come water boarders, come dress torchers… there’s a place for you here, inside my vacuous core of ice and ash.”

Throughout the work, these themes emerge time and again, with the poet providing commentary on the destruction of the planet while intertwining the commentary with our world’s underlying hatred for the feminine. Each poem builds and each subject suggests the next, leading us down a path of exploration of fear, confusion and destruction, as well as growth and understanding. This work is both an interpretation of our future and also our present. In Bock’s world, robots are “seduced by pageantry, white kites and waving” and they “jump for the fame.” Bock’s alternate world allows us to question what is happening and perhaps, what we are allowing to happen and to wonder if she is right when she says: “without their adoring fans, pole-vaulting robots would be nothing but cans crying into themselves.”

Bock suggests we will “die in a bed of your own making” giving us a dire warning but also a fantastical place where none of this is actually real and we still have time to make sense of these empty spaces before the monsters truly emerge. Perhaps, the poet seems to imply, there is still time to revive the artistic self, the sense of wonder, and make things right.

By the end of the work, is it clear the poet speaks more than a universal truth. Rather, she is a guide to help us on a journey of poetic exploration. As readers, we can jump in and try to figure out some of the greater questions before it’s too late.

Or maybe none of this exploration is anything but a vague reflection of an extinction-level event and at the end there was “Only a girl who turned into a bird and flew next to you for a time.”

Walls and Mirrors: Enacting the Howls of War A Conversation with Deborah Paredez about her newest poetry collection, Year of the Dog

Deborah Paredez is a poet, ethnic studies scholar, cultural critic, and longtime diva devotee whose writing explores the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. Her latest book, Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), is a Blessings the Boat Selection, Poetry Winner of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award of Poetry. It tells of her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.

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Tiffany Troy: Could you introduce yourself and talk about the history leading up to the writing of Year of the Dog?

Deborah Paredez: I am Deborah Paredez and the author of Year of the Dog. I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and read Trojan Women for the first time. I became completely enamored with that play and obsessed with Hecuba in particular. It was around that time when I became aware of the silences in our home around my father's participation in the Vietnam War.

In some ways, my understanding of myself as a poet was tied to the experience of being the daughter of war and tied to the tradition of feminist elegy. The motif of Hecuba crying out plays itself out in this book and it took thirty to forty years to write the book that in some ways I had been meant to write from the beginning.

Tiffany Troy: How is Year of the Dog a book “with and not just about your father”?

Deborah Paredez: In my childhood, because there was so much silence around the war, I often sneaked into my dad's closet where he stored his photo album from Vietnam. I would pour over these photo albums like a kid reading Playboy. I knew instinctively that perhaps answers to the questions hanging in the air about my household could be found in these photos.

Even though I thought I was being sneaky, my family knew. Many years later, when my family was cleaning out the house my mom said, “I'm going to send you these photos that I know mean something to you. You can scan and then send them back to us.” So I did. I realized these photos held a very important archive not just for my father's experience, but also of Latino participation in Vietnam. This experience, in turn, has historically been and continues to be documented incompletely. As a result, I wanted to engage deeply with those archives and to co-create this work with my father. I understood that we were co-creators of this work since he was the photographer whose work I was engaging through my poetry.

On a literal level, I asked for permission to use my father’s archive. Being “with” my father, as opposed to “about” him also had a political meaning. It meant carrying a sense of reverence for him and his story from the perspective of the daughter, as opposed to transforming him into an object of study.

Tiffany Troy: As a poet, it always felt clear to me that the stories of the Vietnam War are told through your lens as you father’s daughter. How was the process like, weaving personal artifacts with iconographic images of war at home and abroad?

Deborah Paredez: Finding my father’s photographs was important in a number of ways. One aspect that really mattered was that the photographs were in the same medium, photography, by which we have often come to know about the Vietnam era. The Vietnam War was the most photographically-documented war because reporters had unrestricted access to combat. As a result, the reporters brought about those images that we saw on the nightly news with images of the dead. These images ultimately fueled protests against the war.

The photographic image, however, has in many ways over-determined our engagement with and our knowledge about that war. I was interested in defamiliarizing the photographs for the readers/viewers. Even as the photographs document, they have also inured us to those horrors. I wanted to re-familiarize us all with these horrors through an aesthetics of fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, echo, etc. I wanted to implicate the history and stories that iconic photographs of war tell by buttressing them against my father’s photographic archives to expose the racialized terms of inclusion, to foreground the often overlooked Black and Brown experiences of war.

Tiffany Troy: That triptych with Mary Ann Vecchio in the middle and buttressed by the arm of the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc on either side definitely challenged my understanding of war through the archive. What guided you to juxtapose photographic fragments and how do your father’s handwritten photographic captions fit into the iconography of the stories you're weaving together to allow us to view the Vietnam War anew?

Deborah Paredez: I was very much guided by a poetics of fragmentation in bringing down iconic photographs to an arm, for instance. I juxtaposed the images through resonance or a kind of image rhyme visual rhyme or by images that are stitched together so they exposed the seams of each other. We knew the rest of the picture and implicated ourselves in our familiarity. I also wanted to show that there was only so much I could reclaim in excavating my father's story and the stories of soldiers like him. There was a partiality—in all senses of that word—because I was speaking as the daughter of this experience.

Using my father’s captions that he scrawled on the back of some of his photographs was important because of the way by which we're trained to understand the photos. I wanted his voice to be present and handwriting always implied the presence of the body. I fragmented and excerpted those captions so that as to foreground the sense of partiality, the elusive subject that was always present in this work.

Tiffany Troy: You made sure that your father's face did not appear in the collection. Why?

Deborah Paredez: It's important to always interrogate our attempts to represent the other, whether that other is my father or Kim Phuc or Angela Davis, and to understand the power dynamic between the writer and the other. For me, it was to present while emphasizing that I can only ever grasp partially my father’s experience. As such, preserving his privacy and rendering his own subject preserved and inaccessible to me and to us is important.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use songs and howls to add texture to your collection?

Deborah Paredez: In a very early version of the poem “Hecuba on the Shores of Al-Faw, 2003,” a sonnet, I realized I was being a little too tidy because I was trying to preserve the 10 syllables per line. Tinkering with the poem helped me realize the ways in which the book had to reenact the indecipherable howl.

I tried to do that in the final poem in the collection, the untitled concrete poem that repeats and fragments the final lines of the second poem in the book. I hoped to leave the reader with a "pang led" howl, wanting to require the reader to make the sound so that we're all heaving together, so that we see the limitations of language.

We also see the howl in “Year of the Dog: Synonyms for Aperture,” in the howling of “O—H—I—O—I—OH—OH—OH—” and in the Janis Joplin reference in "Self-Portrait with Howling Woman."

Tiffany Troy: Year of the Dog is the product of meticulous research. Turning to the specific example of the Edgewood Elegy, what is the nitty gritty process like?

Deborah Paredez: The nitty gritty is always boring, being the nitty gritty. Writing the “Edgewood Elegy” was difficult because Black and Brown people’s relationship to documentation has always been overdetermined yet un(der)-documented within the larger US imaginary despite having served in high numbers proportionally in the Vietnam War.

When I was writing Year of the Dog, Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” came out. Black and Brown soldiers are almost nowhere in that multi-episode documentary. Part of the reason we remain undocumented even in the most valorous moments, is that during the Vietnam era, Latinos were still (mis)characterized racially as White. Researchers literally counted the Spanish surnames in the casualty list to get a guesstimate.

Fortunately, in the Edgewood case, there was an actual monument in San Antonio documenting the names that the community could document. I poured over those names, plugging them into governmental and other databases. One site listed Vietnam War veteran casualties and whatever additional information that the site could collect, like if they were a Corporal or what unit they served in, or if they had siblings.

While there were many pockets of no information, I wanted that poem to capture both the absence of these men and the absence of the documentation and my struggles to attain that so that is how that poem came about.

Tiffany Troy: How do the three epigraphs set up the realities, narratives, and mythologies of the three sections that follow?

Deborah Paredez: The epigraphs very much provide a Venn diagram for the book.

I wanted the quote about Hecuba from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to be the original mythic cry from which this book makes its echoes. I also wanted to signal that while the stories of people of color I tell may appear very regional, it is a tragedy or story worthy of the epic treatment. In Adrienne Rich, I find a feminist committed to bearing witness to experiences that may not have always been hers. Her explicitly feminist ideology and feminist poetics was important in my own upbringing as an unabashedly feminist poet. June Jordan speaks to the very particular experience of racialized subjects. In her case, speaking about Black communities, she insists that we respond in ways that correspond with the scale of our tragedies. Within the context of this country her insistence that we are beyond time for being reasonable echoes through all three epigraphs. In these senses, all three of them are about that howl, which set the tone to guide readers into the mode that the book would register in.

Tiffany Troy: The second section speaks of Kim Phuc’s extraordinary and one-of-a-kind story. How do you bring yourself and your culture into her story?

Deborah Paredez: As a work of documentary poetry my book is invested in exposing the ideological work that photographs and other official archives do. In its aspirations toward feminist elegy, it is also invested in exposing the gendered terms of war imagery. In the collection, I explore the ways in which “othered” women, whether they are Black, Vietnamese or the teenage runaway (in the case of Mary Ann Vecchio), have been positioned in war photography, both in service of war or its resistance.

Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc is exemplary of how war images often perform a kind of violence, even as we understand that immediately after taking that photograph, Ut helped Kim Phuc get to a hospital. It took a lot of soul searching to find a way to reach across time, space, and other divides toward Kim Phuc’s specific story with a sense of care and commitment to retrieving the subject from the ways she had been rendered an object. Part of it involved reading into Kim Phuc’s history. I relied heavily on a great book called The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong, which spoke of Kim Phuc both before and after the moment captured by Ut's camera. Kim Phuc spent some time in Cuba. While there, she briefly took a trip to Mexico. In that initial trip, she was hoping to defect. Kim Phuc and her coterie visited the Temple of the Sun and while she decided in that moment that her overseers were too vigilant, I was struck by her own journey that took her to places that have particular resonance for me and my people. I was interested in having Kim Phuc be in a mythic location, both situated in and trapped by history. So I latched on this tiny moment in her own biography and did some documentary speculative work that that one does when you're a documentary poet.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate Vietnamese geographies and the Vietnamese faith into the poems about Kim Phuc at the Temple of Cao Dai and the Temple of the Sun?

Deborah Paredez: I was very fortunate that a dear friend of mine, Hoa Nguyen happens to be a Vietnamese historian. She became a consultant to me about not only how to be factual but also how to incorporate certain elements with a kind of cultural specificity. I didn't incorporate very explicitly a lot of iconography or spiritual elements, or even mythic elements of Vietnamese Buddhism, aside from what Kim Phuc’s own biography engages in.

It was important to pick up on the biographical details: Kim Phuc and others were at the temple hiding out. The temple is a sanctuary that is no longer safe in the war and its aftermath. It was really important for me to begin in the temple, in the moments before the bombing, to emphasize that Kim Phuc exists before that moment, just as she exists long after it.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate and refract the different identities through place names and languages other than English in a predominantly English language collection?

Deborah Paredez: Year of the Dog addresses both the insufficiency and violence of language. Hecuba was so grief stricken that she barked or howled. The most mundane or clichéd form of language, like the idiom, possess a kind of violence that is largely unseen.

With the use of Spanish and English, I was chatting with my friend, Sadiya Hartman, about the book and she said something like, "It makes sense that you would be writing about Hecuba because of La Llorona.” La Llorona was the mythic Mexican folkloric figure of the weeping woman. Until that moment, I hadn't made that explicit connection, but it made so much sense, and I was grateful for her insights. Putting La Llorona alongside Hecuba reflected my own poetic and artistic traditions. It was important for me to have the reader see that La Llorona is just as kind of mythic and as epic and important as Hecuba.

Similarly, much as Latinx communities are often predetermined in terms of language and documentation, I think of the meaning of having my last name spelt with a Z and not S in one of my poems. What does it mean to have a last name as “walls” (paredes) misspelled?

Tiffany Troy: Earlier, you were talking about “Paredez” meaning wall misspelled. You also wrote of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial becoming a mirror in the collection. How does the wall versus the mirror dichotomy play into your collection?

Deborah Paredez: The walls and mirrors idea came about in a very literal way. When I was 12, I went on a road trip with the neighbors to the Vietnam Memorial. It was the 1980’s, not long after the war, and I remember visiting the Memorial and being very moved. The Memorial’s granite was so polished, purposefully so, that you could see your reflection and were thus implicated in the losses carved into its walls. Beyond this moment, I was writing this book in 2018, which was, at that time, the year with the highest number of school shootings in the nation's history. I wanted the reader to experience being separate from the historical subject and yet included in its present-day impact.

Tiffany Troy: How do you approach talking about the way in which the women are grieving through the loss through their fathers, brothers, husbands, and family members?

Deborah Paredez: It’s definitely dangerous, right? With the mythic women, it's a little bit easier because they're not going to be so damaged by my clumsy attempt. But historical women, like Deborah Johnson, Angela Davis, Kim Phuc and Mary Ann Vecchio, among others, were women to whom I wanted to pay respect. I found that if I wrote in the second person, almost like I was writing a love letter to them. The second person, then, shows the poet genuinely attempting to reach across time and space to honor them.

Tiffany Troy: How do you both honor veterans and protestors who want out of Vietnam?

Deborah Paredez: Many veteran writers before me get at the complexities of the Vietnam War. Yusef Komunyakaa is an exemplary model of a veteran poet who both writes about his own experiences in Vietnam as a Black soldier in a way that's not jingoistic while also not dismissive of the particular struggles faced by soldiers like him.

In my collection, I wanted to show how in these imperialist projects, those who are often most devalued are summoned to maintain or expand the reach of the colonial order. For me, then, it was important to begin with the story of my mother and grandmother. As much as this book is about my father, this book is an origin story about how I learned to grieve and to shout out against war from maternal figures.

I wanted to foreground how Latino experiences, even in regards to Vietnam War, were just as diverse as White experiences. In “Self-Portrait in One Act,” which features the fascinating story of Delia Alvarez and her brother Everett Alvarez, Delia becomes an anti-war activist even while her brother is being held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Delia doesn't want to be deployed in the ways that the POW families are often deployed. She's like, “No, you will not use me that way right, because what you are doing is wrong, even as I am honoring my brother's experience there.” Delia is a perfect example of the kind of experiences that I wanted to bring to bear.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use poetic forms to challenge the propaganda of war?

Deborah Paredez: Documentary poetry is very much invested in using a poet's intimacy with the vicissitudes of language to trouble the document, whether that document is a decree, an edict, a speech or photograph. Coming out of that tradition of documentary poetry, I am invested in both troubling and generating documentation through a poetics of erasure, repetition, and idiomatic (il)logic. How do we rearrange the idioms so that they tell a different story about war and warfare? For me, this approach to poetics helped me think through and beyond the particular ways that language gets debased in war propaganda.

Tiffany Troy: In the “Edgewood Elegy,” the poem visually takes the shape of little, lined up gravestone markers. Other poems take the form of lists. Does the poem like find it's form or do you choose the form intentionally and then the contents are to come to be?

Deborah Paredez: More often than not, the poem finds its form. So, in the case of “Edgewood Elegy,” as I was trying to gain information about these casualties, I just kept coming up again and again against the silence in the archive. Part of me wanted to build a poetic monument—there was certainly an actual monument built in San Antonio—and to render within that monument the silence. I wanted to stage the monumental-ness of that silence, to insist that we disorient or reorient ourselves to acknowledge this grief, so you have to actually turn the page, to literally turn the page to see the history.

In other times, I deploy received forms, like in the opening poem, “Wife’s Disaster Manual,” which is a villanelle. The villanelle in its obsessive repetition, is ideal for the insistent instruction. I found it was a perfect container for holding Lot's wife's insistence that we stand still, and keep standing still, and still, and refuse to look away from the burning city.

As a formalist, I am interested in how form determines our way of knowing. I'm not just reverential toward form but deeply curious about finding its seams so as to undo them. Sometimes the form or the photograph need to be deconstructed, rendered, or ripped apart at times, to spill out of the frame.

Tiffany Troy: In closing, what are you working on today?

Deborah Paredez: I'm working on a work of literary nonfiction, a memoir about my life with divas and their role in my life. About how divas guided me as a Brown poet, thinker, essayist and performance critic. And about how, even though we often associate divas with kind of the singularity, divas have actually taught me to really love and be in relation to virtuosic messy women and not be afraid of them. And I’m also working on some prose poems or lyrical essays about the sea and all of the things that the sea evokes for those of us people of color.