SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CEPHALOPOD

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

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

ELEVATED THREAT LEVEL

ELEVATED THREAT LEVEL BY RACHEL GALVIN

“Sometimes I’ve said good morning when I meant to say what is that hideous thing,” writes Rachel Galvin in Elevated Threat Level, a collection concerned with the power of media, the repetition of history, and the assault of violent images that saturate our modern world. While the subjects of these poems are, indeed, “hideous things,” Galvin injects lyricism—sometimes puzzling, always fresh—into each line or phrase, which makes for devastating and beautiful writing.

In reading this collection, I was awestruck by Galvin’s control of the line; the poet is able to suspend readers in unfathomable, perfectly-rendered moments. One such moment occurs in “Age of Contagion,” where Galvin writes: “Meanwhile, a child’s spine was being stretched / by special South Korean machines / until his body curved into a bridge. / He blinked there for a while.” A stanza break follows the final line, supercharging the image she captures: a perfect view of shock and horror. 

I cannot sugarcoat it. These are difficult, painful poems—but Elevated Threat Level did not dishearten me. For every boy transformed into a bridge, there is a “. . . holy meanwhile, in Haiti / one girl survived by eating fruit leathers for three days.” There is faith here.

Green Lantern Press.

—Review by Emma Jones

OCULUS

OCULUS BY SALLY WEN MAO

Sally Wen Mao has a gift for persona poems. In Oculus, she depicts figures such as Anna May Wong, a Chinese–American Hollywood star, and Afong Moy, the first female Chinese immigrant, in vivid, autonomous ways—contradictory to their blurry historical representations. While other poems pixelate or distort the world rendered—for purpose of criticizing the inability of white America to see, instead of display, others—these persona poems strike with conviction. Anna May Wong’s voice proclaims, “I’ve tried so hard to erase myself. / That iconography—”

Here Mao discusses the dehumanization of women of color by offering them protection: blurred images, new armor, grounds and oceans to bury and lose themselves in, “Because being seen has a different meaning to someone / with my face,” she writes. The poems in this collection can be stark and violent, where “blood sickles down,” and the speaker deforms herself, and hands are “cold like gauntlets,” but despite this and the ghosts that follow her, Mao carries through “an exhausting / hope” that makes Oculus a victorious and worthwhile read.

Graywolf Press.

— Review by Emma Jones

LOVE DREAM WITH TELEVISION

LOVE DREAM WITH TELEVISION BY HANNAH ENSOR

“Our fears distort our reality,” writes Hannah Ensor in her first book of poetry—and this phrase begins to sum up Love Dream with Television. In addition to hinting at the pervasive fear of otherness that plagues our present, the poems in this collection wrestle with the scrutiny of bodies, unfair representation, and popular culture’s effect on our thinking, claiming that “we want our poems / to have beloveds / because / beloveds / give us an excuse / to talk about television.” Despite the low–key anxieties present throughout the collection, each poem travels persistently—if not boldly—through its subject: all questioning in some way the human experience in relation to oneself and to one another.

As Love Dream with Television time–travels through the 21st century—pausing to wonder why we should aspire toward the behavior of celebrities, or watch television shows like Friends and America’s Next Top Model—the reader is implicated in the cultural phenomena; but I found that, after having “gone through all the emotions with / them: they were TV emotions: some more than others,” I was comforted by the book’s occasional tenderness, where Ensor cautiously reminds us: “My book loves you [ . . . ] You are a friend.”

Noemi.

— Review by Emma Jones

WILDER

WILDER BY CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM

In her second collection of poems, Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm navigates her readers through a richly chronicled though devastating world. These poems are inhabited by splitting lands and bodies, their speakers and lyricism propelled by the search for hope, for relief, for a better future. They hold such weight—as in the poem “Beginning,” where a speaker boldly implicates themselves and us: “Now we began to wonder whether we had done wrong things. Or rather, which of our wrong things had been wrong enough.”

Though the collection grapples with difficult subject matter, Wahmanholm’s careful curation of words and sounds cradle the reader in an assured, almost omniscient, voice. The internal rhyme and rhythm of these poems help us to carry them. So stricken by the sounds, I found myself reading out loud to hear, and hear again, the stories Wahmanholm is telling us—or rather, reminding. The poems in Wilder are powerful and compelling, interested not only in confronting the rifts in our history and landscape, but connecting us to each other.

Milkweed Editions.

— Review by Emma Jones