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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunlight on Grief: A Review of Mystery and Mortality by Paula Bomer

Grief is unwelcome and, like an unwelcome guest, has a way of sticking around long after the party’s over, chairs are stacked, and the light’s turned out. Working around grief’s hidden edges, that’s what we struggle with, like breathing through glass. Paula Bomer’s exceptional new book of essays, Mystery and Mortality: Essays on the Sad, Short Gift of Life, is breathing through those shards in any way it can.

Much of Mystery and Mortality is personal: about Bomer’s mother, her children, her father, somatic pain. But interspersed are meta-musings on literature, on Tolstoy, Gaitskill, Flannery O’Connor (lots of O’Connor), DFW. At first, the sequencing bothered me. What in the world does Tolstoy have to do with dementia?

We work through grief in our own ways. Some eat our feelings to the tune of Haagen Daz, others exercise until exhaustion. Bomer chose to exorcise her demons by seeking an explication of suffering through works of literature—how pain and grief in fictional and non-fictional worlds runs in rivers beneath sight. By uncovering these truths, Bomer came to understand herself, “To what extent that suffering is or is not a result of our free will seems almost irrelevant…How to—to quote Wallace again—say to yourself, ‘this is water, this is water.’”

Bomer doesn’t conceal the grief in her life, she exposes it, hoping that sunlight will wither it. In the aptly titled introductory essay “My Mother’s Dementia,” Bomer writes, “It unnerves me, the possibility that we never stop wanting our mothers.” She is forced into a caregiver role but also craves her mother’s protection and benediction, succor from a once-strong, once-capable woman whom Bomer might not have liked, but admired. “She was insanely beautiful and righteously smart …. Later, I understood that those two things, when combined, are the things the world hates most in women.”

While Mystery and Mortality’s content is upsetting, there are moments of levity. Bomer’s blunt honesty transforms simple prose amusingly, curmudgeonly. “I looked out at all the beauty and thought, ‘All this beauty, too bad it is full of Austrians,’” she writes, feeling melancholy in the midst of bucolic nature. Bomer understands that without the relief of comedy, pain is unendurable. Even when discussing her mother’s failing mind, she’s funny: “When my mother first became demented, I thought she was just being really annoying.”

Besides the pain and humor, Bomer allows her exploration of sorrowful moments of beauty. In the essay “Under the Jaguar Son,” in which she deconstructs cannibalism, her love of her children, and Calvino, there are lovely, strange lines that play jump rope with prose poetry, “We eat pussy or cock, we eat each other…Perhaps also, we are always consuming and wasting as we go about our living, birthing, begetting, and dying.” The will to beautify tragedy is redemptive.

Perhaps my favorite essay focuses on the villain in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. Unlike McCarthy’s legions of male fans, who perhaps glorify the darkness in his prose, Bomer takes a counter point, seeing the implacable villain as an avenging angel, meting our dark vengeance as, “…an angel, sent by God to destroy all of those who suffer from greed.” This interpretation, while seemingly odd, makes a certain amount of sense when taken in the context of the whole collection. It’s relatable to the age-old question of why God allows evil and suffering. The answer reminds me of the film Jacob’s Ladder, “If you’re frightened of dying and holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.” I see comfort in that.

The redemptive powers we possess, and the enemies of our own nature are what Bomer’s book revolves around: “What strikes me most is the idea that smugness—not violence or vitriolic hate (although yes, that as well)—is the opposite of compassion.” While she feels grief as deeply as we all do—“After my father’s suicide, after I’d alienated my friends, I felt I lived in a bubble…Often I would crawl the walls, screaming out for my father…,”—the book is her redevelopment of connections sundered by loss. She heals through text, through communion with other writers, likeminded souls. For readers, there’s a lot to learn, “Because once you acknowledge you have a soul at stake, you have a lot to lose.”

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

There is no book I have wanted to recommend more than Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. I have always had favorites. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy is one the most crushingly believable dystopias I’ve ever encountered, James S.A. Corey delivers a nuanced and heartbreaking look at oppression and the cycles of history in The Expanse, and no matter how many times I read it, I never made it through John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle without Doctor Burton’s monologues moving me to tears. Yet, despite their beauty and the deep sense of wonder these books inspire, I recommend them selectively by audience. Despite its brevity, few of my friends have completed In Dubious Battle; despite its painful plausibility, Atwood’s work can be straining; despite its fun, The Expanse is not a masterwork at the level of the sentence.

Machado’s work is not like my other favorites because there is no audience to which I am not desperate to give it. After reading the collection’s first story, “The Husband Stitch,” I told my girlfriend she had to read it. After reading the collection’s second story I sent an email to my professor telling him that she displayed the concept of maneuverability that we’d discussed in class perfectly. After a friend posted on Facebook asking if anyone had recommendations for books by women, particularly that dealt with mental illness, the collection’s penultimate story jumped to mind.

There was very little in this collection that I did not fall in love with. The stories are beautiful, horrifying, and filled with a cutting observational eye. Machado’s characters are so fully rendered, so empathetically engaged, so painfully confused, that they feel more real than the constructs of any writer I’ve yet read.

Machado breaks every rule of a creative writing workshop. Some of her stories are lists, one dictates impossible instructions for how it should be read out loud, one is a summary of twelve seasons of Law and Order SVU. They display the deepest tenant of writing, not to show instead of tell, not to write what you know, but that if you can break a reader’s heart with every sentence, you can do whatever you want. Machado’s prose is so good that even in the SVU recap, which is long, I hung on the edge of every episode summary, wondering what strange and seemingly random place the next one would take me. Even when the stories in this collection feel at their most dissonant, an underlying logic drives them forward. In this Machado is able to achieve an atmosphere of horror, without ever having to throw a bucket of blood onto the wall.

This atmosphere is perhaps the book’s most interesting aspect, and I think the one that makes the most powerful and unifying statement. In one of the collection’s stories, the protagonist is clearly at the center of a horror cult. Strange boils appear across her body, the mutilated body of a rabbit appears on her doorstep, the name of one her companions remains elusive no matter how many times she interacts with the woman, teeth come up in detail again and again in a way that made me sure someone’s mouth was going to be removed by the end of the story. Still, despite the cloying, ominous environment that Machado establishes, the story’s conclusion was nothing like what I expected.

Horror in Machado’s work doesn’t come in the form of a disgruntled ancestor, or a monster on the hunt, or a dispassionate alien abductor. Instead it comes in the lingering look of a suspicious friend, the insistence on the part of a husband that his wife have no secrets, the realization that one’s doppelgänger is out in the world, living a more perfect version of one’s own life. Horror is something to be lived with, worked through, either accepted or confronted. Machado is able to levy the every day cruelties that we heap upon one another and give them the narrative weight that turns them into menacing signs of what awaits on the next page.

The trouble then is that Machado doesn’t even need to imbed a monster within the stories’ conclusions. The signs she uses are self-referential. The horror is the act of living. In her stories, Machado reveals that to be alive and conversant, especially for a woman in our society, is to live already in a sort of horror story, one in which the people around you are suspicious of your motives, your feelings, your dreams. To be a woman in the world of these stories is to feel something looming even when everyone around you asserts that everything is fine, that your fear is unfounded. In this way Machado’s work feels truer than anything I’ve ever read, she’s able to pull something deep, spiritual and wondrous out of the banality of the every day. As heartbreaking as Her Body and Other Parties is, it is equally important. Each time the stories in the collection refuse to flinch away from the uncomfortable truths they encounter, they demand that the reader, too, look into that horror, no matter how small, and acknowledge it. The compassion this book demands is extraordinary, and it’s exactly what the world needs.

If there must be a drawback to Machado’s work then it is this: It pains me that there is not yet a vast library of Machado’s work for me to seek out, there is no long list of books for me to track down. I, and hopefully you, will have to wait, counting the days until this extraordinary writer gives us another glimpse into her mind.

Medusa's Country by Larissa Shmailo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delta Flats: Stories in the Key of Blues and Hope by Dixon Hearne

I must first confess that I’m probably part of that book reading majority who doesn’t normally pick up a collection of short stories for my summer beach reading. I find myself leaning more toward the depth and breadth of a novel or a memoir and the other-worldliness that sort of immersion in a longer book can provide when one is seeking escape. But when I first encountered Dixon Hearne’s Delta Flats: Stories in the Key of Blues and Hope (Walrus Publishing), I was immediately intrigued, not only by the allusion to one of Stevie Wonder’s greatest records, but by the Southern geography the title also alluded to, a geography with which I am quite familiar, and quite honestly, one with which I am deeply in love.

When I was in graduate school, I was also in love with the short stories of Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor, and opening up Dixon Hearne’s collection was a welcome reminder of what I admired so much in those wonderful Southern tales. Take the opening story, “Somewhere Deep Inside,” for example, in which two young boys learn a hard lesson about the potential dishonesty of grown-ups and the protagonist’s subsequent decision to not let that reality make him a bitter man: “From someplace deep inside, some deep vein of wisdom, he knows that if he threw that first rock [in response to the antagonist of the story], he would never stop.”

This story is followed by other, equally engaging, coming-of-age tales, all organized under a section header of the same name. The next two sections, “Resolutions” and “Turning Points” offer up their own stories featuring troubled characters who are all simply trying to find their way in a fallen world. But Hearne provides them all with glimpses of hope, a welcome reprieve from today’s mostly nihilistic and too-cleverly experimental short fiction (perhaps the reason why folks have mostly turned away from this once-engaging form in the first place). But Hearne promises to bring us all back into the fold with these traditionally-told Southern stories of “blues and hope.”

The final section, aptly titled “The Blues,” contains what are arguably this book’s strongest stories. We are introduced to Cheveldra, for example, the spunky narrator of “Don’t Try Me,” a first person narrative in which the narrator tells us that “I ain’t lookin’ for no trouble ‘tween now and eighteen. And if you get me into any, I’ll cut you, too.” One can’t help but think of Huck Finn here and the poetry that is inherent in colloquial speech like this, its cadences and familiar rhythms. And like Twain, Hearne is able to capture that magic of language effortlessly in these tales.

The concluding story, “Angels of Mercy,” is perhaps my favorite. It tells the story of Lazarus, who dreams of leaving the cotton fields in northern Mississippi to attend college with his girl, Marva Lee, whom he doesn’t know is pregnant with his child. Marva Lee doesn’t tell him because “fieldwork doesn’t set aside time for having babies.” But when near-tragedy and then real tragedy occur, Lazarus, like his namesake, “rises straight up in the night,” suggesting that there’s indeed hope that can be found in despair, a single beam of light in an otherwise dark cave. This is why readers come to good fiction, to see that light—and Hearne does not disappoint. His beam shines through each page.

As variegated and as beautiful as a Southern flower garden, Dixon Hearne’s Delta Flats: Stories in the Key of Blues and Hope hits notes that range from tragic to comic to hopeful, all with a consistency in theme and tone that makes this collection as satisfying and engaging as any novel you’ll find on the shelf this summer.

In fact, the collection—much like the great music album to which its title alludes—has an overall musicality about it that makes readers feel as though they are in a smoky juke joint, dancing with abandon to the expertly hammered-out riffs on the worn ivories of a well-tuned piano. So pack this book in your beach bag this summer and get lost in its contents as the sand covers your toes and the waves crash offshore, salty and green. You won’t soon be sorry you did.

Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen

Person/a is a positively dizzying book. At first it seems similar to the gritty, gut-punch emotionally raw stories of Elizabeth Ellen’s earlier collection, Fast Machine:

The second time I drove to see him without telling him I did not tell anyone I was going. I was bored of talking about him with my friends and was embarrassed that I had not managed to overcome my feelings for him. Several of my friends had mentioned the word “therapy” which I thought of in a similar vein and with similar seriousness as the words “murder” and “online dating service.” I.e., I couldn’t take any of them seriously, though of the three, “murder” felt the least offensive and also the most likely to succeed.

Without bringing in a different prose style though, things quickly become significantly more amazingly complex and layered.

Person/a centers on a fictionalized Ellen’s intense obsession/relationship with another writer, or a musician (same man, I’ll explain more below). For the most part, this man keeps her at a distance. There are only a limited number of interactions in person; the majority of their relationship takes place over text or email, with even few actual voice phone calls. In fact, the majority of their relationship involves him supposedly trying to prevent a relationship at the same time that he pulls her back toward him and she attempts to get him to do so.

The complexity comes in about the time we hit the second volume one. Supposedly structured in four volumes, there are in fact multiple volume ones. Ellen tells it one way, and then re-approaches the same thing in a different way (while still managing to advance the story).

For example, the man is an unnamed writer in the first volume one, but a musician named Ian in the second. Breaking up with her previous lover before Ian becomes going back and forth with him repeatedly, in love with both the previous lover and Ian in different ways. Jamaica becomes Mexico. A daughter becomes a son, and then oscillates repeatedly between genders. The changeable details end up altering seemingly at will.

In one volume one we have:.

The first time I drove to see him without telling him was two days after I got back from Jamaica. I think of our relationship now in terms of before Jamaica and after. I was gone six days. I often wonder if I hadn’t gone to Jamaica if things would have turned out differently. I think it’s a fair thing to wonder.

In another:

The first time I drove to see Ian without telling him was two days after I got back from Mexico. I think of our relationship now in terms of before Mexico and after. It is the cruelest way to think.

The differences are small, but significant. These differences change the overall impression of what is going on. There are many passages like this. Some are thematic repetition; some are the reality of the novel shifting under the reader’s, and Ellen’s, feet as the main thread stays unchanged and progresses.

Ellen, mixing autobiographical information with fiction as she does, is deciding and re-deciding how to cast it all, what details to include and what to hide or reveal. She’s seeing how it affects the whole, and her. After all, she’s writing herself as a character defined by this obsession. Does she not define the persona and live in it as much through the writing as through the obsession itself? Combining instead of cutting, she’s layering multiple meanings into the novel while the main thread of meaning running throughout does not change.

At the same time that Person/a seems chaotic and uncontrolled, it’s clear Ellen (the author, to whatever extent there is a difference) is completely in control. This is a wonderfully sophisticated structure for such straightforward prose that leaves the reader as bewildered and emotionally flayed as Ellen (the character, again to whatever extent there is a difference). Gratifying as Person/a is on a sentence-by-sentence level, the book is something that really needs to be experienced as a whole in order to really experience what it manages to accomplish. At the end, I’m more stunned than able to decide or articulate what I really feel about Person/a, and that’s marvelous.

What Was It For by Adrienne Raphel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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