A Review of Black Ice by Kerry Shawn Keys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(“Aurora Aurora”)

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

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A Review of St. Ivo by Joanna Hershon

Joanna Hershon’s slim, yet layered fifth novel, St. Ivo, takes place mostly during a weekend getaway. Sarah and her husband, Mathew, visit their long-estranged friends, Kiki and Arman in upstate New York. The story, however, is far from linear. There are secrets in the background. There are masochistically overplayed memories and one, looming, life-defining mystery about Sarah’s absent daughter, Leda, that will keep you turning pages, as if you’re reading a thriller, even though you know it is not that. 

St. Ivo is a story about one woman’s search for connection. Sarah struggles to connect with others while she struggles to connect her past and present lives because something happened with Leda that cleaved her life in two. There is before and there is after and Hershon’s mastery lies in her ability to show Sarah’s disjointedness, while making her story, as a whole, feel connected and complete. 

Sarah lives inside a hardened shell, an all too familiar mechanism. As with Sarah, as with ourselves, the shell stems from pride, from a secret fear of not being enough. To avoid judgement, we keep thoughts, wishes, hopes, facts to ourselves. Habits, money, geography — other obstacles wedge themselves between relationships so that if we don’t make an effort, if we don’t share our secrets, our vulnerabilities, we lose touch. Our shells harden. 

This isn’t new information. We know we have to be honest and open to connect with others, but it’s so much easier to digest this fact when we see the world through Sarah’s eyes, when we see how disconnected she is from her best friend, when we watch her seek out hollow connections with strangers because she can tell them lies. The lies provide only a temporary balm, a way to keep her hurt private and intact. 

Sarah’s pain defines her and it takes the whole book for her to acknowledge that “Leda’s absence…was the center of her life. She’d chosen to make it so.” Here is the crux of all sustained misery, which Hershon drives uncomfortably yet satisfyingly home — more often than not, it’s of our own making. Yes, some things are out of our control but once the waves pass and we pick up the pieces, we can either choose to move on or we can stay put and polish our shells. 

Hershon doesn’t tie everything up with a bow. There are questions left unanswered. There are levels to Sarah that might never be known, even to her, but we are left with hope. We are reminded that the spaces that form between true friends and partners are never permanent — they can deflate after just one, honest conversation because genuine connection breaks down our barriers and allows life, the ebb and flow of it, to come rushing back. In Hershon’s words, “they were breaking apart. They were coming together. They came and went with the tide.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calderón-Collins is creating her new “magick.”

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

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

The Unknown Unknowns: DJ Lee's Wilderness

In 2018, 15 years after DJ Lee begins exploring the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, her long-time friend and intrepid wilderness ranger, Connie, is reported missing. At first, Lee is inclined to disbelief: how could someone who knows this area of land so well become absorbed by it? But as Remote demonstrates, wilderness—and particularly the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, one of the most remote wilderness areas left in the United States—will always remain somewhat unknowable, even to its most dedicated worshippers.

A map at the beginning of Remote shows the expanse of Selway-Bitterroot, spanning a northern portion of Idaho and the very Western portion of Montana. It is accessible only through a smattering of small towns around its edges. To experience the more secluded internal areas, one must travel by foot or helicopter, which Lee does many times over the last 20 years, in search of both her own sense of belonging and her family roots. Lee brings a sense of awe to her descriptions of the land, recognizing that the wilderness is not something to be mastered or understood but instead appreciated. “None of us really owns the earth,” Lee writes. “This is a lesson I relearn again and again.”

Lee’s personal connection to the Bitterroots emerged in February of 1999 when she was instructed by her grandmother to retrieve a mysterious box from her attic. Inside the box is an old photo with the enigmatic note scribbled across the back in grandma’s hand: “Moose Creek Ranger Station, in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where I spent many miserable years married to a man I didn’t love and who didn’t love me.” Thus begins Lee’s search for the stories of her grandfather and grandmother, Esther and George.

If anyone is to be handed a box full of mysterious old documents, it should be Lee, a meticulous archivist. Weaving her own family history with those of the original Native American inhabitants and various homesteaders throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Lee crafts a sort of patchwork anthropological history of the Bitterroots, from lost pioneers to modern-day opportunists. Most interestingly, Lee also includes photos in almost every chapter—of her relatives, of strangers, and of the land itself, curating a multimedia sensory experience that seems rarer in prose narratives than it should be.

In her journeys into the Bitterroots, Lee meets a slew of memorable characters, including Dick, an unofficial Bitterroot archivist, and the “The Indiana Jones of Moose Creek,” and Joe, who operates a shuttle service for hikers, described as petite, but gregarious. Of course, the character who made the biggest impression on Lee is Connie, who hovers as a presence in Lee’s memories throughout the text, offering both warm and hard lessons about how the wilderness has a certain disregard for human experience. In one passage, Lee recounts a story Connie told her about witnessing a moose mating ritual:

“And then one morning I woke up and there was blood all over the ground. I investigated and it was clear that another animal hadn’t died there—that was obvious. I knew it was some mark of animal life, some mark of love. Makes you think about the mystery of life that thrives in that place, and there I was, a lowly human, trying to figure out what happened.”

Connie’s is only one of a long line of disappearances in the Bitterroot, some of them positively haunting, like the story of George Colgate, a cook in an expedition of wealthy men from New York who became sick and was abandoned by his party. Later, a message in a bottle with a goodbye to his wife and children was found. Though these stories, Lee also paints the wilderness as its own character: an enticing mistress, one with no allegiances. Despite the love that the author has for the land, she also recognizes it can be a profound place of loneliness and unease, both for herself and her grandmother, who suffered from unnamed mental illness during her life as the wife of a wilderness ranger at Moose Creek. Through these stories and others like it, Lee also seems to be crafting a subtle portrait of women in the wilderness, and how their relationships to the land might be different than men. When Lee and her family are on a camping trip, they encounter a young woman, covered in bruises and near-starving, who arrives at their campsite with her menacing boyfriend. Refusing to leave with Lee and her family, the woman continues on her trek, and Lee worries after her welfare. When she confides in her mother, her mother replies that some people don’t want to be rescued. “And I knew immediately she was right,” Lee writes. “Because this was the wilderness, where people came to be left alone. Where people could disappear, if they wanted to.” 

In the Johari window, a therapeutic schema popularized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a Pentagon briefing in 2002, there are four categories of knowledge that one has about the self and others. There are things known to the self but not known to others, things others perceive but not the self, things both others and the self can perceive, and finally, things neither known about the self nor others. These are the true “unknown unknowns,” the category of which I might put Lee’s story. As much as Lee works to “solve” the mystery of her grandparents’ lives, and Connie’s disappearance, the lesson learned here is that the wilderness, like the true narratives of our lives, rarely wraps up in neat ends.

But there can be a kind of spirituality in the limits of where our knowledge can take us. In one of the most moving and fascinating threads in the book, Lee describes the phenomenon of “constellation workshops,” in which participants are asked to re-enact each other’s family and ancestral dramas in order to bring new energy and light to the hardships they faced. At first, Lee is skeptical of the practice, preferring her data-driven approach, but eventually, she attends one, letting strangers and the workshop leader, Barry, re-enact the story of her grandparents and the wilderness as a live drama. Here’s what Lee writes after the workshop:

It was more than insight that I had gleaned. As we motored through the streets in silence, all I could think about was how, at the end of my constellation, George had said, “I love the land more than I love them,” how Barry lined up the women, Great-Grandmother Mary, Esther, my mother, the representative of me, and me, each with our hands placed on one another’s shoulders, my own hands stretched toward an imaginary Steph and whoever would come after her, and how Barry said, “you can let the land go, but it’s there for you, always.” How the thunderstorm that had been building outside finally burst and rain hammered the metal roof to drive home the point.

And so, in essence, is Lee’s point—the wilderness can be there for us as a refuge, but, like people, we have to learn to accept it in its refusal to be contained or completely understood. In this acceptance of the unknown, we can also find a sense of belonging.

Native Grey: Andrea Rinard Reviews Chuck Augello's The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love

Chuck Augello’s debut collection of short stories, The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love, presents a retinue of Everyman characters and their stories, revealing quotidian reality so painful and recognizable that it hurts, wonderfully. Augello doesn’t explore or examine loneliness, or hope, or grief or love as much as he breathes closer and closer to those ubiquitous human experiences, detail by detail. The characters who pass through Augello’s gaze express the exceptionality of the everyday, leaving us blinking and shaken in the marvel of the universe behind the faces of characters who are achingly familiar.

Flynn, the first character we meet in “Pizza Monks,” is an appropriate gateway to the stories that follow in this collection. As he weighs the ethics and inconvenience of staying after-hours to make pizzas to cater a self-immolation, Flynn speaks of the motions of kneading dough as muscle memory. This idea serves as an underpinning metaphor through the subsequent stories as the characters either succumb to or break free from the habitual motions of being human. Brother Phap Dong, the Buddist monk intent on setting himself on fire, exhorts Flynn to “find your pain and make an offering to it.” For all of Augello’s characters, the pain is merely the commonplace pain of being human. Their offerings are as disparate and profound as redemption, absolution, enlightenment, or simply momentary respite from the inevitable messiness of life.

For Kevin in “Smoke,” the pain is steeped in his regret of one youthful choice that has doomed him. Years later, his older, successful brother, Jerry, wants him to burn down his over-mortgaged, post-recession McMansion, and Kevin can see no way to refuse. Augello shows how the forks and bends in a life’s trajectory are as illusive and potentially destructive as fire. Kevin’s one bad decision lingers like a stench of smoke, cloying and unmistakable.

In “The Prerogatives of Magic,” a seven-year-old girl named Chloe accidentally makes her mother disappear, and the father is left not questioning whether or not his daughter’s “tricks” are real but simply and quietly begging for his wife to reappear. It doesn’t matter whether Chloe has a power that “just comes.” Instead, Augello presents the magic of two people who find “a comfortable spot and try to hold on.” Even through ten years of marriage, there is the magic of a husband who makes his wife a cup of tea every morning and leaves it for her when she emerges from the shower. He offers his pride in exchange for her return even as he imagines “a hotel room with her blouse and skirt neatly folded on the desk, her underwear dropped at the foot of the bed.”

In “Little Green Everything,” Keith is out of work and feeling “obsolete” and “useless.”  He struggles with the brutality of the modern world at the same time he tries to help his wife Penny through her response to it. “No other planet hurts like we do,” Penny says, and Augello distills that agony into moments that ache with the simplicity and banality of a bruise. That throb continues in “All God’s Children” as an unnamed veteran and a capuchin monkey liberated from a research lab mourn the loss of Kristin, the woman they both love who was killed in a hit and run.

Augello’s Dash in “Cool City,” clings to and depends on the reliability of numbers and the presence of fire extinguishers. He finds unexpected respite and acceptance from a “level one fast love practitioner” while in the oncoming path of a hurricane. Annabelle has her own gale force impact on Dash as she extols the virtues of avoiding finding reasons not to love someone while offering unexpected and heartbreaking moments of grace and love. Like Dash, William K. in “Languid” finds himself moved incrementally into changing from a listless and indifferent Best Buy employee who encourages his customers to pray in supplication to the appliances he’s selling for a 10% discount to a man rocketing into a new velocity.

Through the extraordinary, ordinary catalysts of murder, suicide, infidelity, computer code tattoos, natural disasters, alien abduction, arson-for-hire, mysterious packages, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Augello’s cast of characters are familiar like a drop of water placed under a microscope. The proximity and access Augello provides is his offering to us and the heartbreaking wonder of being human. Each character is a foreign land for which we need no map or translator. As we follow the characters, we realize that “inexplicable grey space” is our native home, filled with people who are just like everyone we know. Just like us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bleeding Roses," the poetry of Adeeba Shahid Talukder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From section viii, “God-shaped Woman”.

… To be a slave:
the pull of light,

the chain’s idle
bind.

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

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

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

*

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

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

From “Kathak: The Dance of the Courtesans:”

… You, fragile
as glass, will learn:

you were made       to break.

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

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

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

A thread

from pre-

eternity

to past time’s

end, a thread

that binds

movement

to gesture, a crow

to a narcissus.

I stretch.

My waist, this morning,

is a knot.