VILLAGE

Village by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

In Village, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs has built a three-dimensional world in which poetry is embraced as a visual art as well as a written one. In addition to playing with form and punctuation, this collection acts as its own art exhibit, through its persona “The Artist.” The exhibit includes: a sculpture of The Artist’s Harlem, notes outlining directions for unusual memorial services, “a kind of selective glossary,” black and white photocopies of the paperwork bureaucracy tries to bury us in. 

These are poems about all aspects of life, including death, memory, addiction, kinship, Dove body wash, music recommendations, and that piece of home décor you got for a steal last week. Each page is filled with wit and certainty, playfulness and sincerity, danger, and a little heartache. Some poems use line breaks and white space in such a way that it looks as if the words were tossed from the poet’s hand like dice, yet there is confidence in every. last. decision. 

This collection exudes boundless imaginative energy and an unabashed independent streak, with one poem stating, “in order to disregard protecting / the identity of the people mentioned, / all names of personages & places / have not been altered.” In Village, Diggs’s imaginative funerary directions reveal a hope for a vivacious death, while personal artifacts and detailed memoryscapes show how ardently she grasps the life she has lived. In this work, The Artist is truly alive.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Sylvia Foster

DOT

Dot by Ron padgett

Celebrated poet Ron Padgett’s latest collection Dot is a refreshing read for its wisdom and levity, or perhaps for the wisdom in its levity. In his notes on the title, Padgett asks the question, “How short can a title be and still be effective?” and explains how he was drawn to the word “dot” not only for its shortness, but also for its resonance. It’s those ideas of resonance and brevity that carry this collection. Padgett’s poems are wise, and heavy, and about the nature of reality and existence, of loss and love and growing old. But they are also short, and full of laughter. They are made from levity in the way that a comic book is made from hundreds of dots, and the way that our lives are the sum of so many small moments. 

I was struck by how enjoyable of a read this collection was, and most of all, how it came across as effortless, never trying too hard (what the actual craft process is like, however, for creating poems that manage to come across as effortless, is beyond me). In his longer poems, Padgett’s loose associations feel both delightfully surprising and completely natural; in the prose poem “Both of Me,” for instance, how could I have anticipated that the humorous linguistic observations that begin the poem would transition to the subject of a box of matches, then to a portrait of Allen Ginsberg painted by Alex Katz? And yet I find myself trusting these turns without question. 

This feels like a byproduct of Padgett’s steady, confident style. He is not proving anything to you. He does not have to. While reading his collection I felt this in my bones, and what a calming feeling this was to have as a reader. And so I’ll leave you with a short little poem that I love, called “Bubble,” so that you can see what I mean, too:

It’s a very great pleasure

to walk with you in November,

our bodies sleepy in the clarity

falling across the city

and to feel a kiss alive

from a height of five feet two

and new shadows on my shirt

rising and falling as I live

and breathe with you.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Sarah Barch

FIGHTING IS LIKE A WIFE

FIGHTING IS LIKE A WIFE BY ELOISA AMEZCUA

Eloisa Amezcua’s poetry collection Fighting Is Like a Wife is a textured retelling of the tragic marriage between boxer Bobby “Schoolboy” Chacon and Valorie Ginn. Amezcua’s research lends the collection a sense of devastating reality that is established from the very first poem, “Tale of the Tape.” Here, the poet lists stats for both Bobby and Valerie, placing Valorie in the division of “spouse,” while Bobby is in the “featherweight” division. This poem is bookended with the “date of birth” and “date of death” of each, leaving the reader to wonder what led Valorie to such an early grave, a question that the poet does not shy away from exploring. 

Amezcua uses fighting, in its many forms, as the lens through which she views Chacon’s relationship with his wife and with the ring, using experimental shapes to reflect the push and pull of physical and emotional combat. The collection has an incredible topography, which visually indicates the emotional vortexes and moments of reflection that accompany such a consuming relationship. Amezcua accomplishes this through the clever manipulation of text, making the reading experience anything but orthodox. Many of the poems also employ a limited vocabulary, which emphasizes the exhaustion and repetition of arguments, both internal and external. These poems explore every iteration of a series of words, indicating how something as finite as word placement can have infinite repercussions. For example, “she thought no one loved / her she wanted me to sit / down & love her” eventually becomes “she loved no one & she / thought she wanted me / to sit down & love her.” These meditative techniques form a bond between reader and subject that persists long after putting the book down. In Fighting Is Like a Wife, Amezcua has crafted a finely-tuned recipe of intuitive formatting and poetic restriction, creating poems that beg to be read again, immediately.  

Coffee House Press

—Review by Sylvia Foster

THE WET HEX

THE WET HEX BY SUN YUNG SHIN

“Everything was white. My footprints—wet, then white. My shadow—west, then white.” 

In their new collection, The Wet Hex, 신선영 Sun Yung Shin, born in Korea then adopted and taken to America at a young age, leads their reader through the Underworld, to the nature reserve that is the Korean DMZ, and along the shores of Christopher Columbus’s journals (juxtaposed with their own immigration documents). The book navigates Shin’s identity—or, identities—as well as womanhood, tradition, what it means to be cast away, and the parts of you that (could) die in the process. 

These poems offer more than just the romanization of featured Korean words—they’re accompanied by the Korean spelling in Hangul. Similarly, one of the aspects I loved most about this book is its appendix of familial terms in Korean, under the title “L’Etranger | An Unburial | A Funeral.” The collection as a whole superimposes the words’ iterations, which Shin themself bridges. It is a “map of what could have been,” as Shin writes, and mourns.

It reminded me a bit of Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche, which sometimes substitutes Chinese characters in place of their English counterparts to form a language barrier, a blending; to put the reader in that place. Here, though, we learn the words along with Shin—an experience complementary to the tensions in the poems. 

Swatches of Korean folklore illuminate the many narratives of the book, and Shin in turn shucks Western religion—namely its God—in favor of Korean shamanism. In their poem titled “Gaze_Observatory_Threshold: A 바리데기 Baridegi Reimagining,” accompanied by the art of Jinny Yu, they highlight the tale of Princess Baridegi, known in Korean mythology as the first shaman. 

Shin’s retelling forefronts the abandonment of the shamanist “foremother” by her parents (she was one girl too many, born into the royal family), and its consequence once the king falls ill: “A king does not need a princess. Until.” Meanwhile, with a series of black and white and gray shapes, entrances and exits and pure space, Yu’s art enraptures the reader, the sections of the poems almost labyrinthine. 

The image work in The Wet Hex is to be gnawed on, deserving of attention and study—and readers will find this worthwhile if they want to make a dent in all the bones laid by Shin’s juxtapositions and syntax, and all that’s in between. The stacked images at times reminded me of incantations or ingredients for rituals, for potions—linked back to the word “hex,” which—as we’re told—has no male cognate.

This is a collection that can teach anyone, especially a poet, plenty about themselves and their art—that can teach anyone to interrogate their place in the world. Spend some time with this one.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Jami Padgett