Layered and Uncovered: A Review by Jo Freehand of Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's 'Dēmos: An American Multitude'

Ben Kingsley? Isn’t he the actor who played Moses or Ghandi or some other religious figure? Does that Ben Kingsley write poetry? The first line on the author page answers, “Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley is not the Ben Kingsley best known for his Academy Award-winning role as Mahatma Gandhi.” So, who IS Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley? And why was the ardent-knifed work of painter Salman Khoshroo the chosen cover art for this particular book, Dēmos: An American Multitude?

“American Multitude,” echoing Whitman’s “I contain multitudes,” is also the title of this collection’s opening poem:

            From the languages of my Haudenosaunee: Onondaga Nation

               as every thing begins                       with the heart            beat of horses

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published Date: 03/09/2021
Paperback, pp. 96
ISBN: 978-1-57131-525-0

Kingsley begins Dēmos with heart. Prior to this opening poem and after a memorial page, there is a “Before Anything” acknowledgment page that includes a photograph of Kingsley’s grandmother behind the “exactness” of prison bars. Bars that held his great-grandfather under the authoritarian rule of Emperor Hirohito for having written a “defiant” political poem. Kingsley continues his multi-cultured lineage of thanks. His is an Onondagan, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian lineage. Within these first pages the answer to Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s identity begins to form. The canvas is primed, clearly gessoed. And a primed canvas holds promise as well as questions. A primed canvas awaits a search.

Kingsley is that artist searching. With language as his pigment, with poetic form as his palette knives, Kingsley creates layer upon intimate layer as he uncovers multitudinous selves, simultaneously exploring just who is this WE in this “We the People.” The layering is dense, but not inaccessible. If I wrote an essay on each layer, each possible theme, of Dēmos, it would be a multitude of essays (or, at least eleven.) Yes, “multitude” is key here.

Questions are more important than answers in this poet’s conversation with identity. Questions of connection and fitting in when intersectional categories are more fuzzy than clear. Questions of what remains when ancestors are slaughtered away. 

From “Nantucket Sleighride”:

            [ . . .] know that my people
            weren’t neatly arked by America two by two, white boys named
            Noah harpooned our asses, by the tens, by the thousands,
collared our necks with barbs and slugged lead

“In the Coffin Meant for Chief Little Horse, Archeologists Instead Find Two Others,” is a poem about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first of many assimilation boarding schools formed with one goal, to eradicate Indian culture, colonize. Kingsley writes that, “…European English / paper WASPs, yellow jackets …” ask in a chorus of “frenzied debate”:

            In whose home will we build our next nest?
 In whose home will we build our next nest?
            In whose home will we build our next nest?

Kingsley questions home when you’re not welcome home, as in “Home/boy,” a poem about his Harrisburg, Pennsylvania homecoming, maced for looking too close at “over a dozen police” arresting a “smaller than five foot” woman. “I guess I got too close / to the other.” It’s a found poem made up of comments from newspaper readers following police version of the macing. One verse, a comment from “Rangerider,” reads:

            Thank you / officers / for your fine work. It’s a shame
           there are some in the city / who would try / to interfere
            in your great work and make good work / look
            bad. Don’t / forget / to replenish your mace
           for the next bunch / of immigrants!

Dēmos is lyrical and storied. It is layered with violent political and personal history, from the atrocity of genocide to not being able to kill a deer on a hunting trip. Kingsley questions and confronts masculinity. “Fire, you little pussy. / Your skin softer than split sausage?” With red colored-pencil, I underlined every violent word and image. From what I’ve told you, you won’t be surprised to learn that my copy of Dēmos, loud-and-clearly, turned red. Then I took a blue pencil because what I have yet to mention is the depth of beauty within Kingsley’s poetry. I highlighted that beauty and every bit of beautiful language. 

From “Out My Apartment Window, West Baltimore: August, 2 A.M.,” a poem wherein the speaker is witnessing the vandalistic attempt to remove the hood ornament from his car:

            […] hope
            within an anvil of heart
            that one boy will
            free the silver:

            And to him
            it will be
            Excalibur:

Beauty. Single words are outlined in blue: kci-coqols, obaasan, ghosted, crescentic, eyelets, akakagachi.  Particulars are outlined in blue: crepuscular twilight, hammy down, Haudenosaunee tongue, glossy fractals of fishhooks, watermelon bodies, twisting like Quetzalcoatl’s tail. Beauty. Entire lines and poems are outlined in blue.

 From “An Old Song, a Frog’s Song: Sing-Along”:

             with your         whole        body
                  sing
           for all         who are         to come
                  sing

Blue for beauty became as abundant as red. My copy became a visual aid illustrating Kingsley’s poetic tension between beauty and violence. The pain disrupts and challenges the beauty while the beauty softens the blow. Notice the proximity of pain and beauty in this excerpt from “Get Out of the Goddamn Car”:

            buoy me to safety             restart my world with a rainbow
            like Noah’s magic boat never            dreamt it could.            

I added green pencil for fresh language and innovation which I quickly realized would overlap what I had already underlined. Green also outlines entire poems such as Kingsley’s reworking of a Punnett Square. Remember that diagram from biology class used to predict genotypes? Kingsley’s version is more about genocide than genotypes. It’s a series of Punnett Squares that includes 18th century Massachusetts Lieutenant-Governor Spencer Phips’s proclamation, one of a multitude of such bountied proclamations: “Twenty-five Pounds ... For Every SCALP of such Female Indian or Male Indian under the Age of Twelve Years, that shall be killed and brought in”

Color coding and penciled notes by Jo Freehand.
From Dēmos by Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org

As green and innovative as Kingsley is, this is not sterile poetry written for the sake of experiment or form. His experimentation and form feels secondary to a primary drive to connect, to write or paint humanity.

I had two colors left in my color-coding experiment. Gold for place, and there is much gold to be found in Dēmos from a Friday night around a campfire to Somerset Kitchen to Conodoguinet Creek to Pulse Night Club to a Boy Scout flag burning ceremony to an uncle’s razed orchard to East Jesus, PA. Dēmos is deeply rooted in place. Identity is deeply rooted in place.

As Dēmos is poetry of identity, why then did I include purple for identity as a final color? Why not simply color every page purple? I used it anyhow and listed Kingsley’s (and/or speaker of the poem’s) many selves. The list was long. To name a few, poet as: descendent of a political prisoner, torch carrier, biologist poet, obedient son, skeptic, historian, storyteller, political poet, language keeper, mixed-race, young witness, racist’s target, lyricist, disrupter, descendent of artists, middle-finger, connected to and part of Nature, father, white man’s myth dispeller, truth teller, “left-over ingredients,” year-of-the-Uma baby, and rule follower. The choice of purple for identity was not consciously planned, but somehow it was right. Purple is the blending of red and blue, identity emerging out of violence and beauty.

Like the portraiture art of Salman Khoshroo, Dēmos is not a search for answers; it’s for engaging with these textured layers, layering and uncovering, layering and connecting, layering and revealing. In Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’sDēmos, it is the search that matters.

Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at: jfreehand@verizon.net

Review by Jo Freehand: Bringing it to the Page: A Review of Dena Igusti's 'Cut Woman'

Publisher: Game Over Books 2020
The Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Paperback, pp.42
ISBN: 978-1732498693

Dena Igusti is a queer Indonesian Muslim poet, playwright, and producer. Cut Woman is Igusti’s debut chapbook. The title refers to the violent practice of FGM, of which Igusti is a survivor. In his poem “altar” Igusti writes: 

            [ . . .] CNN called auntie’s celebration
            FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION
            the gauze between my legs // becomes //
            a banner for each pity party in my body //

Cut Woman is not, however, poetry of self-pity or pity-seeking poetry. It is as strong as the strongest cliché about strength. One could say that it’s a collection of poems about trauma, dissociation, and reconnecting with that dissociated self. One could also say it’s largely a collection about loss, personal and community-wide. Loss is right there in the first line of “bounty” the opening poem:

            the grenade’s lung exhaled into our chests 
and muslims have been spilled ever since

 However, after months of engaging with Cut Woman, I no longer say that it is about loss, disassociation, or reconnecting with that dissociated self. Now, I hesitate to even call it a collection. Yes, these poems are bound within an intriguing cover, are published, and have their own ISBN. Yes, okay, a collection. Still, and instead, I want to call it process. Process, not as in unfinished. Process, as in, this is not a collection of poems about loss. This is the navigation of loss. It’s a right-here-happening-now-on-the-page navigation of loss. This is not a collection about reconnecting disassociated self. This is reconnecting with dissociated self. It’s a right-here-happening-now-on-the-page reconnection with dissociated self. Verb not noun. This is embodiment. Verb not noun. You, as reader, are witness.

This sense of intimately witnessing Igusti’s personal odyssey is attributable to his willingness to experiment until whatever the journey requires of this poet is brought forth. Words, lines, and poems in Cut Woman are brought forth exactly the way they need to be and only the way they can be. That might appear as all-caps, the absence of a word, a one-act play, an erasure poem, double slash marks, bilingualism, the use of both margins, and/or whatever it takes. All of this is more than playful experimentation. It feels essential as Igusti courses his journey:

From “altar”:

            at 9 years old // in a dusty kitchen // i am sprawled // out on the metal altar //
woman in a house dress // face mask // no gloves //dips // a scalpel in a bowl
of muddy water // i ask my tante [ …]

Notice the double slashes, the lower case i, the fragmented list of imagery. How do you feel about those choices? Are they random? Perhaps each was chosen because it was the one and only choice for this moment in Igusti’s trek as he brings this experience as close to the page as wordly (and worldly) as possible. In other words, the opposite of disassociation. To me, those double dashes feel and look like blankets protecting every word. They feel like a safe space, a safe space for a trauma survivor to bring it to the page. And what about the fragmentation in that excerpt? Would memory of such gruesome trauma happen in complete sentences with proper punctuation?

How close to the page can a poet bring disassociation?

From “after the incision”:

            i tell me i miss you

i ask can we ever happen again
           the body leans in        

            [ . . .]

            i sob.

From “self portrait as kuntilanak:”

            but I’m forever tethered
                to the way
                     my body is suspended
                          in memory

Here Igusti writes about the anchoring effect of trauma when, from that point on, living is forever in relation to that moment. Because of Igusti’s creative play with form and because the form matches the moment, even this excerpt hovers, feels tethered, lingers.

Throughout Cut Woman Igusti navigates layers of identity and loss. In fact, it almost reads as a poetic archive of loss, one that includes the anticipation of loss. In his* poem “sacrifice (reprise), or trajectory” he writes:

[ . . .] I think a lot // about death // for someone //
so afraid of dying // i call all my not-loves a loss and grieve

  for parts of me: whether it’s 2 strands of hair

The poem of loss “the tsunami drowns rick del gado’s ‘usa for indonesia’” is one of Igusti’s erasure found-poems. It’s an erasure of the lyrics of a disgustingly racist parody of “We Are the World” about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami:

            there was a time,

      a wave             20 feet high
                        washed         whole country away

The use of erasure here seems multi-functional in navigating this particular loss. Visually, there is an immediate sense of so many lives swept away. It is loss on the page. Remaining words are now distanced as if fractured family members that survived. Secondly, the erasure serves in taking away some of Del Gado’s white power.

In spite of, or perhaps, due to its painful subject matter, there is power in Dena Igusti’s first book of poetry. Power, life, and living.

“sex: a necromancy”:

(which my mother wasn’t allowed to feel that which hers couldn’t either)
this time a thing that will               feel sharp but in the best way this time
I’ll    make use of what was left of what I      lost

And from “in this life you said roses”:

meanwhile, all versions of (what’s left of) me // will try to figure out a way to say

As devastating and as full of loss as Cut Woman is, it is equally full of joy and living. How could it not be? It’s right there on the page. Dena Igusti is right there on the page.

* For those wondering if this has been a typo. Yes, female genital mutilation requires a clitoris. It does not, however, require that the person with said clitoris identify as female.

Review by Jo Freehand: Current Events

Dear Readers,

June’s newsletter did not include my previously scheduled book review. The yet two more police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, as well as the lynching* of Ahmaud Arbery, left me less than enthusiastic to write about or address anything else. I remain so.

My one desire right now is to acknowledge current events. By “current,” I mean since the beginning of our country. By “events,” I mean white supremacy. And, by “acknowledge,” I mean temporarily setting aside my essay-writing self to highlight a few Black poets in lieu of a review. Black poets who were already writing about white supremacy.

 *See endnote on lynching.

Beginning with Donte Collins from “What the Dead Know by Heart”

[…] I wonder
often: if the gun will unmake me
is yet made, what white birth

will bury me, how many bullets, like a
a flock of bluejays, will come carry my black,
to its final bed, […]

 For Donte Collins’s 2017 sharing of the full poem click here. See Collins’s website here.

 
“My Love Is Black” by DéLana R.A. Dameron, 2018

I don’t want to love 
like this. But there is a gun
in the holster & a hand
on the gun in the holster
& my husband’s hands
are no longer in his pockets
because it is night & we are
just trying to breathe […]

 You can find DéLana R.A. Dameron’s website here and the full poem here.

 
“What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Reflections of an African-American Mother)” by Dr. Margaret Burroughs, 1963 

What shall I tell my children who are black
Of what it means to be a captive in this dark skin
What shall I tell my dear one, fruit of my womb,
Of how beautiful they are when everywhere they turn
They are faced with abhorrence of everything that is black.
Villains are black with black hearts.
A black cow gives no milk. A black hen lays no eggs.
Bad news comes bordered in black, black is evil.
And evil is black and devil’s food is black …

Dr. Burroughs’s reading of this poem can be found here.

 
From Parnesha Jones’s “What Would Gwendolyn Brooks Do”

  Another day, when I have to tip-toe
around the police and passive-aggressive emails
from people who sit only a few feet away from
me.
Another day of fractured humans
who decide how I will live and die,
and I have to act like I like it
so I can keep a job;
be a team player, pay taxes on it;

To read more click here. Parneshia Jones’s website can be found here.

 
From “alternate names for black boys” by Danez Smith, 2014

  4. coal awaiting spark & wind
5. guilty until proven dead
6. oil heavy starlight
7. monster until proven ghost
8. gone

Read full poem here and Danez Smith’s website here.

 
Closing with Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,”1939

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America was never America to me.)

Find Hughes’s full poem here and a 2017 reading of this poem by Danez Smith here.

Black Lives Matter.
 Black Voices Matter. Black Poetry Matters.

 Please consider donating to:

Black Lives Matter
NAACP

 
* Lynching is an act of terroristic murder in which the perpetrators feel entitled, on the basis of their identities, to police others on the basis of their identity. These extrajudicial executions are meant to exert control, not only over victim, but also over an entire community or group of people to determine what spaces that community have the right to exist in, or whether to exist at all. Moreover, the perpetrators, on the basis of their own identities and the identities of the victims, do not expect to be held accountable for their violence.

The term lynching is often understood more narrowly as white mobs murdering Black people, usually men, as acts of public spectacle justified by false claims of having committed some crime, usually the rape of a white women. However, these acts of terror can be carried out in private by just a few people, or be carried out against non-Black people. For example, white, straight men lynched Matthew Shepherd because he was gay, and did so in the dark, far from public view.

Review by Jo Freehand: John Sibley Williams’ Skin Memory

Feeling It

Skin Memory (The Backwaters Press, 2019)
The Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Paperback, pp. 96
ISBN: 978-1-935218-50-0

Skin Memory is John Sibley Williams’s fourth collection of poetry, not counting six chapbooks. It’s his second collection in one year (2019). You read that right, second in one year.  Hang on, there’s more. Skin Memory happens to be Williams’ second prize-winning collection in one year! Oh, yea, and one of those chapbooks, Summon, won a 2019 JuxtaProseChapbook Prize.

In spite of that, it wasn’t how prolific Williams is or that he happens to be a nineteen-time Pushcart nominee or the long list of other awards he’s received that drew me to this book. Admittedly it was much more superficial than that. It was the flesh of the title that slowed me down enough to want to take a longer look. The sound of the title, Skin Memory, was conjuring a myriad of images well before I even opened the book and looked beneath its epidermis.

Pulled me right in to:

Because you are what song breaks open your throat […]

Please pretend this sentence is three rows of exclamation marks in bold 48-point font. May I repeat? “Because you are what song breaks open your throat […]” Be still my heart. Between the title and the first half of the first line of Williams’s opening poem “Skin Memory,” I knew this was a book I wanted to read. And so, it goes: 

[…]                                                                              and because the
same century burns a different mark into me. For now I can just listen.
To how choreographed our forgetting. To the dark little narratives of

How could one not want to read more?

And, then, by the end of the opening poem, I’m not so confident that I’m comprehending; not completely. I’m certainly feeling it. Yet, I know there’s much that I’m not understanding. I’m intrigued and want to know more. I want a tour guide or, at least, a button on the page that I can press that will vocalize John Sibley Williams’s commentary.

Fully following it or not, one thing was certain, those first lines were already, already, following me. I felt it. And I welcomed this new conversation. “Because you are what song opens your throat and because the same century burns a different mark into me.” How beautiful is that? Do you feel it? It’s rich. It’s textured. It slows one down. It’s fresh and there’s something else, something clearly right outside the edge of words and poetic analysis. It’s something in that place where lyric meets melody.

Here, try these lines from “New Farmer’s Almanac.” Say them aloud three or four times:

             […] At least the world
  still smells like the world:
dirt-rich, deliberate,
as much oak as animal.

Then repeat, aloud, the following from “Advice Picked Up Along the Way” and, again, hear the sound of poetry that takes us beyond words to a place of feeling poetry.

            […]  but the weight feels right
for the deeds we drag behind us. […]

This is poetry that begs engagement. Not Twitter-length engagement or skim-the-headlines engagement or text message engagement. It seeks - or maybe it offers - a slow, line-by-line, word-by-word, deep engagement. Lines seem to ask to be repeated. Poems seem to say, “Now go get a glass of water, look at the cardinals at the feeder, then come back and we’ll talk some more.” And in reading Williams’s poetry aloud, over-and-over, in an attempt to hear what the poem has to say, its musicality has me feeling as much as, if not more than, thinking. And in that place of feeling, understanding expands. Skin Memory is multilayered poetry revealing itself with each reading.

 There is poetry within poetry. This poet brings tight lines that could stand, on their own, as full poems:

 From “Sons of No One”:

            So far all the suicides have been men
in my family. […]

Here’s another, a line from “Tonight’s Synonyms for Sky”:

             […]                                The thing
about the sky is: whatever names 
we give it are as temporary as those
we keep giving and erasing from
ourselves. […]

Skin Memory is not fluffy. For example: “If I could reconcile the fullness/of the moon, of the black oak/tonight’s moon illuminates, /with the bodies I’ve seen/in photographs hanging […]”

The terrain is scarred with cruelty, loss, inheritance, and what it means to be a child, a man, a father.

 From “Hekla (Revised)”:

             […] In time, lava hardens into
landscape, and we walk over old fires
as if history cannot burn us. […]

Williams’ imagination and dedication as a wordsmith allows us to linger without becoming weighed down in despair. His verbs surprise with a delight that brings the reader in, closer. They create an intimacy. “Maybe it doesn’t take winter to make a tree/in winter or dewpoint to vague a morning field.” “[…] to vague a morning field.”!

His metaphors are equally difficult to gloss over or forget, “[…] stars thrown around/ the sky, like toys I’ve left scattered across the living room for people /bigger than me to trip over. […]”

In Skin Memory, Williams gives us plenty of opportunity to slow down and meet poems face-to-face. Plenty of opportunity to engage in deep conversation, to develop deep listening, to examine quick assumptions, and to see things anew. Plenty of opportunity to feel. Plenty of opportunity to resonate. Plenty of opportunity to connect.

Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at:jfreehand@verizon.net

Review by Jo Freehand: Here: Poems for the Planet, Elizabeth J. Coleman, editor, foreword by The Dalai Lama

More Than a Love Letter,
More Than an S.O.S

My feet are wet and sandy. I’m sitting next to a jetty, a now multi-functional jetty book-shelf and side-table. It’s understandable that this wanted to be written here, long-hand on a yellow legal pad, rather than at home on my desktop. Here: Poems for the Planetis perfectly suited for reading outside. Here, this particular spot between Washington and Jersey Ave in Spring Lake is where I’ve read it the most. Here, this particular book,is what I’ve read the most on a number of day-trips to the Jersey shore after a few hours of cycling. Not only is it perfectly suited for reading outdoors, it’s great for reading out loud.

During an especially windy hood-and-blanket day an American Herring Gull hung out for a pop-up poetry reading. It was a read-whatever-poem-I-open-to kind of reading. Refreshments weren’t served, but she stayed anyhow. The reading began with “The Fish” by Mary Oliver. Seriously, out of the one-hundred and twenty-eight poems in this anthology, I opened to “The Fish.” Here’s an excerpt:

          I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; […]

The reading ended with a selection from the fourth and penultimate “Voices of Young People” section of poems, a section written by children and teens. This is the opening of Griffon Bannon’s “How to Be a Hawk”:

  Feel the wind on your face.
Soar across the sky
with your huge wing span,

Yes, really. At a time like this, at a time when there are protests to attend, calls to representatives to be made, opinion pieces to write, I’m sitting here writing about poems about wind and sky and wing span and fish and hawks and the sea. I’m writing about bike-riding and sitting at the beach reading poetry to birds. Yes, even as the daily deluge of news grows more and more heated, more and more torrential. Yes, even as the world as we know it or thought we knew it, feels like a slow-motion implosion that’s happening way too fast to stop. Yes, I’m writing about poems about Earth, especially at a time like this. Because, well, what is more important than water and air and the health of our planet, which is, of course, the health of all living beings? Better said by Craig Santos Perez in “understory”:

  how will

open air
pesticide drift

affect our
unborn daughter

whose nerve
endings are

just beginning
to root? -

 Don’t worry there is activism to be had. As the Dalai Lama wrote in the foreword of this eco-poetry anthology:

  We human beings are the only species with the power to destroy the earth […] if we have the capacity to
destroy the earth, so, too, we have the capacity to protect it.

The thing is, it’s all so overwhelming, isn’t it? What’s the point? It’s easy to feel hopeless. In “Invitation,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers:

          […] If you still want to look up, I hope you see
the dark sky as oceanic, boundless, limitless – like all
the shades of blue revealed in a glacier. Let’s listen
how this planet hums with so much wing, fur, and fin.

 The structure of Here: Poems for the Planettells me that editor (as well as poet and lawyer) Elizabeth J. Coleman clearly wants us to “look up.” She doesn’t want to leave us feeling despondent. Coleman wants us to be inspired. It’s evident throughout Here.It’s evident in that Coleman sought out the Dalai Lama to write a foreword. It’s evident in the arc of the five sections of poetry from beauty to mourning to the hope of youth to inspiration to act. And then Coleman does something unique and creative for an anthology of poetry; she gives us an easily do-able “Guide to Activism by the Union of Concerned Scientists,” to whom she is donating her book royalties. The guide is as accessible and inspiring as the global and contemporary voices that are brought together in Here. It’s divided into four sections that include, among other things, instruction on: effective letter writing to policy makers, setting up meetings with your legislator, using purchasing power, connecting with media, and “How to Host a Public Education Event.”

This “Guide to Activism” is as accessible and inspiring as the poetry of the many global and contemporary voices brought together in this anthology. Some of those poets are: Wendell Berry Kwame Dawes, Mark Doty, Sasha Dugdale, Brenda Hillman, Carolyn Kizer, Sergio Holas, Tracy K. Smith, and Kirmen Uribe. It feels right to conclude with a taste of “On a Saturday in the Anthropocene,” by editor Elizabeth J. Coleman:

At my post office, endangered too,
I avoid the self-service kiosks, wait in line

for a human. A clerk waves me over
with her smile, asks where I’ve been.

She tells me about a cruise she’s taken

[…]

Now I’m smiling too. What’s your name?

Here: Poems for the Planetis a love letter, and it’s more than a love letter. Here: Poems for the Planet is an S.O.S., and it’s more than an S.O.S. Here is about connection and relationship. It’s about our relationship with others. It’s about our relationship to the world, and Elizabeth J. Coleman knows that relationships, by nature, require attention.

 Fun (and impressive) Fact:Copper Canyon Press, publisher of Here: Poems for the Planet, raised funds to give a copy to every member of Congress.

Review by Jo Freehand: Julia Bouwsma's Midden

Voicing the Past, Grounded in the Present

Publisher: Fordham University Press 2018
Paperback, pp. 96
ISBN: 9780823280988
Foreword by Afaa M. Weaver

[…] they drove us from our house, loaded us into the boats, the carriage, steered us into the bleach cold hall said, Women go left men go right. Then I knew the line / was about to snap. A pair of white hands plucked him off my breast. I sagged down torn, unfurled, gill-slit. And my sweet William he just […]
(From “Sucker Fish”)

Imagine that the government seizes your land. Says you have thirty days to leave or else you’ll be forcefully removed. You don’t have a choice. You’re told to take down your home or it will be burned down. Imagine that you and your community settled that land. It’s an island. It’s your home. You are part of a cooperative fishing and ship-building community. The land and sea are your resources, your livelihood, your identity. Your entire community is evicted from this land that you settled four, five generations ago because there’s this new science called eugenics that declares you unfit, unacceptable, degenerate, “feeble-minded.” Eugenics declares that you must be culled.

 You and your neighbors happen to be mixed race: Sottish, Irish, Portuguese, Native American, black, and white. Mainland publications have headlined you as filthy. Filthier than dogs, lazy, criminal they say. You are seen as a problem, not a person. Nearby communities have no interest in allowing you to join them. They wonder what would happen to their rising tourism economy. Your community must scatter. An entire family of seven is institutionalized to live out the remainder of their days incarcerated, including their three-year-old William.

 This is the story of Malaga Islanders, a community erased by the state of Maine in 1912 because the governor declared that Maine, “[…] ought not have such things near their front door.” To top off this extermination, graves of deceased islanders were dug up. Bodies were tumbled into five boxes and buried at the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. The people of Malaga Island are a part of Maine’s history that has been hushed for one-hundred years.

 Midden is Julia Bouwsma’s history of the people who were Malaga Island. It is poetry of identity and place; place shaped by people and people shaped by place. We see an example of this in “Interview with the Dead”:

Who were you then?

And instantly the tongue becomes the prism
of fracture, land of washed green light –

ferns, wild hops, hemlock, lichen

In this poem, the islanders become the very life-giving green of the island itself.

While writing east-coast Malaga Islanders into poetic form, forms that include: epistolary, persona, instructional, list, erasure, and narrative, Bouwsma restores a neglected grave site on her own land in the mountains of western Maine. The careful attention and introspection that she puts into restoring this gravesite, reveals the level of care and personal responsibility with which Bouwsma restores a people to history.

She approaches the work of righting gravestones and the work of writing the people of Malaga Island with caution and respect. Bouwsma is careful not to overstep. In one of her reflective epistolary poems “Dear ghosts, with a red pencil I draw a map,” she writes:

[…] Blood is a road –
the river we carry inside our skins. The dead are right beside you,
you tell me, but you will travel years to find them. What if every step I take
is a ruin, a heel-dug grave in the crusted snow, a mouth of white?

This overlapping narrative of past and present reveals how connected Bouwsma is to her own land. It’s an intimate connection that’s apparent from the beginning in Midden’s opening poem “I Walk My Road at Dusk”:

  […] The road curves toward
and away. The road spines
the stone walls. My feet stumble inside
ruts my feet have worn.

  All I ever wanted was land: something to press
my fingers into, […]

Throughout Midden, as we take in the inhumanity against the people of Malaga, Bouwsma continually returns us to this well-rooted present. Like the road mentioned above, there’s a constant moving “toward and away.”

Here in “So Many Things” Bouwsma moves toward, zooms-in, to create an intimate portrait of islander Abbie Marks:

They say our family fears water; they think I am afraid
to drown. I dig clams from the flats, ocean licking
the rolled ends of my trousers, mud squelching
my toes. I chink the cabin cracks with rags. […]

 {…} They will come for us. […]

Yes, bringing us back to the present allows us breathing space as we acknowledge such inhumanity. Perhaps it also serves as a reminder that erasure exists today.

Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at: jfreehand@verizon.net

Review by Jo Freehand: Dominique Christina's Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems

Writing Anarcha Alive

Publisher: Beacon Press 2018
Paperback, pp. 95
ISBN: 978-080700921-5
A National Poetry Series Winner
Selected and with foreword by: Tyehimba Jess

This is an important book.

But, first, a pop quiz! What do the following three things have in common?

• The architect of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida

• The metal speculum used in gynecological exams

• An eight-year Central Park, NY statue protest

Hint: It might have something to do with the subject of a biographical narrative written by Dominique Christina, a poet who holds five national poetry slam titles and two Women of the World Slam Championships.

 Answer to follow. For now, a warning: Anarcha Speaks is far from a delightful read. I highly recommend it.

 Yes, Christina’s relationship with language, form, and story-telling is beautiful, masterful. To say, however, that this book is delightful would be like saying a movie about the medical experiments of Nazi Josef Mengele was delightful. Anarcha Speaks is deeply gut-wrenching. It will hold and haunt and hopefully make you angry. It’s a necessary book. Anarcha needs to be properly memorialized, and that’s what Dominique Christina has done. Why does that matter?

 It matters because Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and other unnamed enslaved black women didn’t have a say in being unanesthetized surgical guinea pigs of the man exalted today as “the father of modern gynecology,” J. Marion Sims. (inventor of the Sims speculum and grandfather to the architect of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida). He is glorified. Whereas Anarcha, primary subject of Sims’s experiments, who suffered numerous pinned-down slicings and stitchings, has been reduced to far less than a side-bar mention.

Perhaps women’s reproductive health has benefitted from Sims’s discoveries. Yet, and if so, these discoveries were founded on unimaginable torture and pain of women who didn’t have a say in the matter. They were young enslaved raped black women who were considered property. From “Black Gold”:

  slavers say we black gold
highest price for the ones
who make it well enough

 They were young women who were malnourished and too young to give birth without traumatic injury. Resold, they were now Sims’s backyard makeshift hospital slaves. They were now his property, his experiment. “Property” forbidden, by law, to read and write. Far less than a personal diary was punishable by death.

 This is resurrectional poetry. One-hundred and seventy years later, Dominique Christina has richly fleshed Anarcha alive. With each word, Christina offers another vertebra, another vein, another sorrow, another “belly droopin,” another “closed shut melody,” another “rhythmic dread,” another memory. Hear Anarcha through Christina in “The Chil’ren Might Know”:

        we once was warriors
bone sharp and tangling up
wit whatever wild was in the world
before some ships rolled in
wit folk we ain’t never seen
brandin iron and bullet men

 From the first poem of the book “Anarcha Will Speak and It Will Be So”:

  massa come in like he know I caint cry
new tears

 Christina goes deep into the core of trauma and convincingly expresses a lived experience, as in “Don’t Wanna Hear It But”:

  when he left
seem like he stayed
like i kept
some of it
like I ain’t
have no other way

 And as in “Not Dead But . . .”:

this bruise ain’t no girl
she gone
she never gon be again
she too much a ghost even
for burial

Over and over she writes Anarcha alive with deep truths of trauma such as a continual grappling with faith in God and religion. From “The Preacher Give Us the Story of Job”:

i wanna hear it right but
seem like god always
takin somethin
and wantin somethin
all at once and all you
can do is call it his will

She questions why her prayers aren’t answered during such horror. She continues to pray anyhow. Especially convincing in giving voice to Anarcha and true sign of unbearable trauma, are her prayer requests, her longing to die. “When the Quiver Stops, Aint No Jesus”:

i, wordless and wantin heaven . . .
even hell
least i be gone from snatchin hands

 Readers may have to remind themselves that Dominique Christina wrote these words, not Anarcha. Or did she? Does it matter if a reader confuses the poet and the speaker of the poem? Is that not what a biographical poet would want?

 In Section II of Anarcha Speaks, the poems begin to alternate voice between Anarcha and Dr. Sims. I didn’t like the intrusion. It felt abrupt and invasive like a known predator walked uninvited into the room. Why did Christina make this choice? I didn’t want Sims to have a say. I didn’t want him in this space. Does “his” voice amplify the horror? Is that exactly what Christina intended? Are there things that could only be expressed through Sims such as the racist belief that black women and men are “thick-skinned,” too thick to feel pain as whites do as “he” says in “Blood Misbehaves: The Surgery as Dr. Sims Sees It”:

The complication with the Negro
Is how robust they are.           
They confuse you with their bleeding

Does he add things that Anarcha would never say, as in “How Doctor Sims Sees His Work”:

I will learn the diabolical complexity
Of woman: a synonym for ruin.

 I might have preferred the entirety of Anarcha Speaks in Anarcha’s voice, but I’ve come to realize the poetic genius of including Sims in this way. In the end his voice remains distant and overshadowed by Anarcha, as it should be. Dominique Christina has rightfully placed Anarcha in the forefront.

 Anarcha Speaks is a monument to Anarcha and all enslaved women who had no choice in enduring the pain of medical experimentation without anesthesia. These are our Mothers of Modern Gynecology. They deserve to be memorialized. They deserve to stand in place of the relocated statue of Sims that once stood in Central Park. They deserve many monuments; this is one of them. Dominique Christina has illuminated a history that too-many would choose to keep hidden. She has done what Anarcha asks in her closing poem, “First Is Last: How Anarcha Sees It”:

maybe put the sun in my mouth
chew it up til i’m light all over
wouldn’t that be something?

 It would. It is.

Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at: jfreehand@verizon.net

Review by Jo Freehand: Sarah Sousa's See the Wolf

Predator and Prey: The Story That’s Older Than Fairytales

The cover is haunting. It exudes danger, and danger there is in Sarah Sousa’s third collection of poetry See the Wolf. It’s a story that is older than the earliest version of Little Red Riding Hood. It’s a story about violence against girls and women. It is the story of growing up female and growing into prey-hood. This time the story, including the retelling of myth and fairytales, is set in the 1980s along with “Cabbage Patch plastic,” knowing that Luke was Laura’s rapist on General Hospital, milk carton images of missing children, and having a secret word in case your mom couldn’t pick you up. As in “Tom and Jerry”:

            I might have enjoyed the quiet, the purpling
sky if I wasn’t so timid, seen some humor
in the scenario that had me terrified: a dark car pulls up,
a man opens the door, says the words
that mean you’re mine.

Little Red-type wolves freely roam on, off, and between the pages. Off the page in a bearable, yet clearly visible, distance. Between the pages, Wolf shadows and lures. On the page, some of the wolves are disguised as a mother’s boyfriend or a stranger in the park who, in “Like a Name,”

[…] pointed at my skinny, dark haired sister and all but said, meh.
But when he looked at me he beamed; […]

Or the man in “Poem Without a Forest”:

[…] in the dark/ space/ between /cement wall/ and stunted pines -
filthy and gripping

And a grandfather in the front room in “PAW”:

            […] Sometimes he wanted to hug me
and I would rise reluctantly,
let him pull me against his sinewy body.

Throughout there is also a literal wolf disguised as domesticated dog whose bite required seventeen stitches. Sousa writes that in her version of “Red”: 

            I’ll include how it feels to be eaten,
the entering isn’t clean –
teeth are like dull keys.
The wolf opens you
to your own red
glister like a docent to the body.

 It’s not surprising that a sense of being one step away from death permeates this collection. It loops and loops, as it does when you know you are prey. It appears in nightmarish daydreams, and it appears in actual nightmares as in “Don’t You Forget About Me,” a poem Sousa wrote about a night at a drive-in theater with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.

  […] You were fun, you were young, you
would become obsessed and want to kill us, but this was before all that

Later in the same poem, Sousa writes how this particular wolf became part of her nightmares:

            […] a dark figure in an idling car, a dark figure at the door, in the house.
I was murdered in myriad ways: suffocation, fire, gunshot to the head. […]           

Yes, as the title of the book warns, there are wolves, and there is blood and broken glass and fires and predation and threats and humiliation and devaluing and objectification and loneliness. There is no safety to be found. Unless…

 Unless we go back and start with the first poem in the book entitled, “Self Portrait with Mabel, Rose, Lillianne, Fern, Mildred, Bea.” It sets the stage with a once-a-upon-a-time. The stage curtains are opening. They’re embroidered with Sarah Sousa’s dedication:

For Mom and Jess, for the three of us

The three of us. Sousa is on a stool center-stage, slightly lit. She is telling the story of her birth, the story of her name. The stage lights brighten as a single-file and hand-in-hand line of Sousa’s female relatives enter the scene:

            They embody the word habit,
placing a napkin atop my glass
of water, one beneath to absorb the sweat,
carry a magnifying glass
to read menus. With them
I’m always the youngest in the room.

 They form a circle around Sousa and in unison:

            They ask:
do you believe us?
does it help you to believe in us?

With this first poem in See the Wolf, the interconnectedness of women throughout this narrative is established and unshakable. It’s a union of women that is stronger together than alone. See the Wolf honors the power of women united. This is where safety is found. In “To the Comedian Who Called Thelma and Louise Two White Heifers”:

            Don’t laugh. Women have driven off cliffs,
burned men in their beds, to escape.
Her body over my body, my mother and the dog would face off.
I could feel the answering growl start deep inside her,
erupting in a voice not my mother’s,
a voice to make us larger than we were. Stronger

This connection of girls and women includes raped survivors of an 18th century shipwreck in “The Wreck”:

            […] They dressed each other’s wounds,
sewed cormorant feathers into garments with needles
of bone. Each carried a two-note whistle
from the keeled sternum of a gull.

It’s this connection of girls and women that transforms See the Wolf into a mastered craft, a fine weaving.

Maybe, in the end, trauma of prey-hood never goes away. Maybe it remains as the longitudinal warp, fibers of the wolf, that are held taut and ever-stationary on the framework of being a girl, being a woman. And the weft, the transforming transverse weft to be drawn through, in Sarah Sousa’s case, is every woman in her narrative. And it’s a weft created of a wild and free landscape: grass, spider webs, apples and apple trees, “a quartz boulder in the woods,” “that moment of dawn,” “intricate bracts and branches,” eggshells, “under feathers,” “fields of ravens,” birds.

 So many birds. Birds punctuate Sousa’s poetry: bird as creator of a soft place to land, bird as a unit of measure and resolve, bird as a covering, bird as an instrument for protection, bird as companion, bird as song, bird as transformation, bird as myth and magic, bird as a painter’s inspiration, bird as something steady when a partner is away, bird as baptizer, bird as voice, bird as bird, bird as animal other than Wolf.

Over and under, over and under, Sousa weaves her imagery-rich weft through the dark warp of predation. She weaves with a touch of mystery. She draws it over and under with enchantment of language and sound. From “Not the Same Bird Twice”:

When I called for him in the crawl space
I felt a century of domesticated ghosts
undrowse and rouse themselves, some
plastic sheeting rustled,
a long yawn silence stretched.

Over and under, she draws the weft through her hands, often allowing it to wander off into its “own woods.” Over and under, Sousa draws the weft until she has created a beautiful multi-fibered tapestry that she has called See the Wolf.

Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at: jfreehand@verizon.net

Review by Jo Freehand: Taylor Mali's The Whetting Stone

Dark and Without Despair

The Whetting Stone, by Taylor Mali, is life-affirmingly dark. Life-affirming, not in a “happily-ever-after” or “light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel” way, being a collection of poetry in dialogue with death and the suicide of Taylor Mali’s wife, Rebecca. It is life-affirming in that, although intense grief is present throughout, Mali remains fully present in that grief. He is committed to whole engagement without turning away. It is an engagement without need to polish, romanticize, sensationalize, solve, or fix anything. It is a fierce and vulnerable full-bodied allowing-for-all-that-life-is, which includes brutal loss and pain. Grief, too, is life and alive. And, as Mali expresses in “Grief Moves”, his opening poem that addresses his father’s death, there is a life-affirming sensuality in allowing this darkness to touch the core of your being:

            how my wife let me fill her full
            of my tears when I came home,
            silent, hard, and broken; 

           […]

           how we came together, loss now
           a moving thing between us. […]

“Grief Moves” foreshadows further loss. But first it is followed by “Making Ravioli,” an extended relationship metaphor that is bubbling over with delicious embodied imagery. There is “holding” and “stirring” and “kneading” and “gripping” and “…together, using all four hands.” The first stanza beautifully echoes “Grief Moves” with a brokenness that appears again and again:

            If you were the flour,
            I would say you hold me like the eggs,
            broken and mixed up as I am.

There even seems to be a bit of humor with Rebecca naming the not-so-perfect piece of ravioli, “deformioli.” Here is a glimpse of Rebecca alive and participating in full ravioli-producing union. And then, third poem into this narrative, with no metaphor about it, in the first stanza of “Six Stories:”

            Years ago, on a Monday morning, my wife,
            dressed for work in a new suit and elegant shoes,
            stepped outside the window and fell to her death
            six stories below.

Mali continues to describe six possible “stories” that led to Rebecca’s death, each story a descending stanza. The first addresses inherited trauma of being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor:

            Perhaps the first is the one about the tattoo on her father’s arm,
            the dark number he never spoke of.

The Whetting Stone is not an easy read. Darkness permeates. Mali does, however, have a way of lightening the weight of the sorrow for his reader. Fine details and clear particulars, which Mali does so well, fill this tragedy and make it bearable. It’s those concrete details that, by the end of this book, have you longing for a stranger, longing to have met her, longing for Rebecca’s survival; and yet it’s those same details that make the sorrow bearable and even call you back to read and re-read.

I’ve come to think of this collection as the Rebecca poems. There are a few poems that read as letters written directly to Rebecca, posthumously. They seem to ground the entire collection. They include: “Twelfth Anniversary,” “Things We Both Know That I Still Have To Tell You,” “Meeting at Monet’s Water Lilies,” and “News of My Divorce Reminds Me of Your Death.” 

From “Things We Both Know That I Still Have to Tell You:”

            You are not ugly, old, broken, broke, or stupid.
            And you certainly are not fat. […]

In “Twelfth Anniversary,” it’s Rebecca’s voice telling us:

            I’m not the type of woman who would drive such a car!
            This car should be driven by someone peppy named Cindi
            who dots her eyes with flowers, hearts, or stars.

That was possibly another brief moment of humor on Mali’s part as he finds his wife “aghast” to admit that she owns a red “sports car.” It’s also another glimpse into the perpetual dark that infiltrated Rebecca’s life.

In “Elegy for the Lighter Sleeper,” Mali writes of facing that darkness in the darkness of night.

           She the lighter sleeper, needed noise not to think,
           needed it to sink into the rock and tide, even if
           it only be the late-night sweeper come to sweep
           the dust and grime and darkness from the ground

With this entire collection as a whole, Taylor Mali has enlarged the conversation of mental health and suicide with gentleness, dignity, and authority. In particular, I’m thinking of the above poem “Elegy for the Lighter Sleeper” and “Depression, Too, Is a Kind of Fire”.

In “News of My Divorce Reminds Me of Your Death,” grieving now at the end of his second marriage, he lovingly addresses Rebecca, his first wife, in sonnet:

            Lover, at last, please leave me, after all these years.
            You have cried enough. Leave me to these tears.

Throughout this book, we are witness to the reunion or union of Taylor and Rebecca, in grief and in love. And we, too, as readers, must let go of the happy ending, as Mali himself has reconciled in “Sestina:”

            […] I knew she
            was not all right, and I was not
            her knight or savior. […]

“Sestina” is the nineteenth and last poem in this brief, but epic, work. It concludes with three of the most chilling lines I have ever read. Three lines that honor the fullness of Rebecca. This is a book worth having on your shelf, so I am refraining from quoting those and many others so that you can experience them on your own.

Mali does not try to force a meaning upon his wife’s suicide, but by being present and bravely engaging with his grief, he has provided us with poetry that is deeply meaningful and significant. The Whetting Stone is not a work of despair. There is no despair. There are poems, well-crafted poems and a raw accounting. It is clear language given to the unspeakable. Poetry made possible because of the depth of the darkness that Taylor Mali was willing to embrace and bring to the surface to share with us. It is why poetry matters.

Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at: jfreehand@verizon.net