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

BLUEST NUDE

Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe’s debut collection Bluest Nude brims with paintings, photographs, and sculptures, which serve as more than source material for ekphrastic poetry; Codjoe brandishes art, particularly art created by Black women, as a medium with which to materialize her poetic project. Codjoe interacts with these artists and their work such that the poem that follows becomes an extension of the visual piece that precedes it, as if the poetry of now is grasping hands with the visual art of the past. 

One example of this timeless connection comes from “Detail from ‘Poem after Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,’” which meditates on Betye Saar’s 1972 piece. Time and image seem to collapse as the speaker “[beholds] a sea / of blood, dark as syrup, oozing / from Aunt Jemima’s neck, / and four women flying, without shoes / or wings, from her maternal, amber body,” making it clear that the liberation of Aunt Jemima is still ongoing. 

Juxtaposed with myriad artistic and cultural references are exquisite vignettes of personal experience. Various intimacies are entangled in the soft and moody language of this collection, which nurses a quiet eroticism throughout. Codjoe explores all the possibilities of womanhood and sex, from being perceived in the “fractured angles of sex” to the speaker’s lament, “Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable.” 

The simultaneous desire for sex and sexlessness is echoed in the coexistence of motherhood and non-motherhood. Codjoe asks, Is it labor that makes a mother? If so, which kind(s)? The ambiguity of mothering leads to one of the most electric moments in the collection: “I hid / my tears from my mother because that’s what mothers do.” Here and throughout Codjoe’s work, womanhood undulates and continually unfurls.

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Sylvia Foster

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