SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CEPHALOPOD BY KATHRYN SMITH

Kathryn Smith’s Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is a collection of poetry ruminating on how to best live in the dying world. “Dogged” by goodness, as Smith writes in “Psalm Formula: Anti-epistle,” the speaker of Self-Portrait with Cephalopod grapples to find her place within the grand scheme, and looks to natural sciences, pop culture, womanhood, mental illness, and a wobbly—or absent—faith in God to interrogate why she (or we) exist. Simple matters such as watching hummingbirds, driving a Prius, or getting a mammogram each become their own Atlas: shouldering the burden of the magnificent, terrifying world the speaker cannot help but acknowledge, observe, and exist within.

The relationship between the speaker and the world extends to the relationships between humans and animals and science, as explored in several of the collection’s poems. Often, the speaker expresses a wish to be good, as in the poem “Situs Inverses,” but provides only complicated versions of goodness to indicate what she means.

After explaining situs inverses as a medical term where a body’s organs are flipped—a “mirror image of their expectations”—she returns to an earlier image of “an immature squirrel dropped from / the maple’s high branches in my driveway” to close the poem with: “I’d like to be a better person […] / One who is able to kill a maimed squirrel / rather than watch its quick, shocked breaths, […] / hoping that as night / dips near freezing, death will take / its own course.” Smith’s craft subverts expectations, asking readers to perceive from new angles—and by asking us to linger with the cruelty of the squirrel’s slow death, she seems to ask the reader: when is killing no longer cruel?

There is much to celebrate in this complex, apocalyptic, wonderful book. Among unanswerable questions are moments of pure lyricism: “I want / to press my pink finger against / your marbled blue / bubblegum fat,” Smith writes in an early ode. In “Concerning Nectar, Concerning Brack,” she composes: “Not even birds / find sweetness—only water / stained red. We’ve omitted / sugar hoping to slow invisibly / quick wings, to glimpse / the proof of flying, green flutter // altered to simple mechanics.” The poems here, their language, stick like spiked seed pods.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by E. Thomas Jones

CARDINAL BY TYREE DAYE

Cardinal, Tyree Daye’s second full-length poetry collection, pays homage to inheritance while simultaneously searching for a place to belong. However, because the speaker of these poems is a black American, his journey from his rural hometown to the city is complicated by historical violence and ancestral traumas. In “Carry Me,” Daye writes: “…I’m filled with people, / someone has taught me to fly. / Whichever way I flew, my inheritance couldn’t be lifted / from northeastern North Carolina’s wet clay, / its hands hardened around my weighted ankles.”

Many poems in this collection are personal and intimate. Reading them transports you to a small, North Carolina town, lets you peer through the windows of a family home, and stops beside you on the road to give directions. Others compound historical and literary references, as in “Field Notes on Leaving.” In the collection’s opening poem, Daye draws a distinction between himself and the white poets before him, reminding: “I can’t afford to think like Whitman / that whomever I shall meet on the road I shall love / and whoever beholds me shall love me.” Daye skillfully weaves together both the personal and historical, presenting an experience of living as a black person in America that is both singular and universal.

The collection is more than poetry—it also functions as a guide for its audience, providing markers throughout the text. Some markers are repeated, vital words: stars, ocean, grandmother, field, sky, cardinal. Others are recreations of constellations with historical significance, such as the Big Dipper. Others still appear as photographs. In “The Shape of God,” Daye provides a clue as to how they function: “I made you a cardinal // because there’s so many in this town, / and I’m tired of asking your photos to speak / the moment they were in.”

Cardinal’s speaker, identified as Tyree in the final poem, “Field Notes of Beginning,” is always looking up. In a landscape that attempts to root or even bury him, the sky symbolizes freedom, safety, and a map that cannot be followed. Daye leaves us with these parting stanzas: “I said my few-note goodbyes my dead will not come / I will not see a cardinal in the city // so I drew one on my chest / A coop inside a coop inside of me.” The words are bittersweet; the speaker leaves, but his past remains enclosed within him. Still, the book’s world opens up in these final lines, visualizing something beyond the heavy inheritance the speaker carries.

Copper Canyon Press.

—Review by E. Thomas Jones