From the Inside Quietly
Eloisa Amezcua
Shelterbelt Press, 2018
Eloisa Amezcua’s debut collection begins with a self-portrait poem in which the speaker, as a child, sinks to the bottom of a pool “legs akimbo,” “screaming words she shouldn’t know.” The image of this particular kind of underwater singing is both familiar and strange, and it establishes the thematic concerns of Amezcua’s poetry. From the Inside Quietly explores the way language binds and separates us. Amezcua charts the transgressive and luminous potentials of the lyric as she describes teaching her mother English over the phone, arguing with her sister about keeping a handgun in the house, walking home alone, sitting at her father’s bedside in the hospital, and navigating the downside of a romantic relationship. The speaker of these poems seeks not only to translate the dire, raging, and riven interior music of her consciousness, but also to open herself up to the lacunae and stillnesses where that music might be tendered and touched:
This is how I was
taught to love:
to silence yourself
is to let others in.
Amezcua manages to speak radiantly through her own silences. This blazing debut presages great things to come.
Field Theories
Samiya Bashir
Nightboat Books, 2017
Field Theories, Samiya Bashir’s latest collection, uses the language of quantum mechanics to frame a complex investigation of “this skipscrapple world.” Bashir challenges social, linguistic, and aesthetic conventions as she examines the way myth, history, and language shape our perception of selfhood. In Field Theories, “the world stays unstable / anyway,” despite our best efforts to glide effortlessly onward; the page itself becomes a destabilizing field wherein the sonnet, the prose poem, and even the poetic line might be recalibrated. In one of the collection’s central observations, Bashir notes:
You know how the universe blinks and we
exist for a minute or two with our
classic hits station and our marshmallows
our wars and flags and television and
shit. Coke bottles falling from the sky to
an old man’s village and the white people just
laugh and laugh and line up to pay and laugh
and get paid and laugh. That’s what they made.
What Samiya Bashir has made is a collection of poetry that disputes the facile assumptions of continuity that hoodwink us into believing in the immediate redemptive power of our national and personal narratives. Nevertheless, Bashir holds out this hope: “Still, somehow, we are / laughter. We are the doorway out. / We are (again) the doorway in.”
Barbie Chang
Victoria Chang
Copper Canyon Press, 2017
“Desire is reaching out for the sweet maybe,” the speaker in the first section of Victoria Chang’s new collection remarks, attributing this observation to Aristotle. Barbie Chang, the heroine of the first and third sections of this book, yearns to be in the heart of possibilities forever denied to her; she remains on the periphery of the social circle of mothers at her daughter’s school, she tends to her aging parents in their failing health, she attempts to navigate the complexities of her relationship with her “Mr. Darcy.” Chang’s real subject is the loneliness at the heart of contemporary American life:
Barbie Chang loves Evites Paperless
Party Posts that host her
ego patch her holes she puts barrettes
on her heart so other
people will see her will hear her her
heart is made of hay is
disturbingly small held in its cage she
is never late when invited
This loneliness is digital, linguistic, and factional; it has something to do with the ways we define ourselves and the physical layout of our lives. The America that Barbie Chang inhabits is an “America that most people don’t care / about on most days.” Barbie Chang dwells in endless exile, but the vibrant sonnet sequences in the second and fourth part of the book provide an alternative to permanent ostracism by positing the salvific potential of love, even when it hurts and haunts: “love is / the only thing that is not an argument.”
Tunsiya / Amrikiya
Leila Chatti
Bull City Press, 2018
Leila Chatti’s chapbook, Tunsiya / Amrikiya, chronicles the poet’s experiences as a Tunisian American, deftly exploring issues of identity and notions of national belonging. Chatti’s poems are at their most poignant and searing when they focus on her parents, and on her complex relationship to her father’s Islamic faith. As she puts it in “Night Lament in Hergla”:
There is no world in which I am not haunted,
no willing God to relinquish me.
My mother taught me death comes
wailing from the shadows, my father
all ghosts exist in smoke. I search
the sky for light long extinguished,
make wishes on their bright graves.
Tunsiya / Amrikiya haunts because it provides a beautiful testament to the hopes of immigrant parents and to the realities of their children lost among the Bougainvillea of Raleigh in spring and inhaling the crisp night air of East Lansing in autumn. Leila Chatti’s voice reasserts the primacy of love and connection, running counter to the discourse of hate and fear propagated by those in power. Chatti’s poetry offers its readers arnica and eyebright for the Trump era.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.
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