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As I continue to dive into poetry, lead only by an uneducated poetry brain and my well-tuned cover gut, it's amazing how often I hit on work I connect with, in whole or in large part. I say this not because of any lack of "worthwhile" poetry, but the exact opposite problem - we are surrounded by a heavenly wealth of authors of all backgrounds writing fantastic things.
The problem is, as always, mine. Poetry is the hardest thing for me to read. I would guess it is one of the harder forms to write. So I don't always get the connections or see/understand the symbolism. But I also rarely pick up a collection that doesn't teach me SOMETHING. Maybe if I collect enough golden nuggets my reading ability will be honed. A girl can dream. The three titles in this post ran the gamut in form and substance and also hit the spectrum of how much I could connect.
I had not heard of this work when a trusted book friend went nuts over it and highly recommended it to me. It was my first read of 2022 and all I can say is "WOW." Starting the year with your socks blown off is pretty fantastic.
Two summers ago our car broke in half like a candy bar on the freeway & we all spilled onto the pavement as crumbled as sticky caramel-peanut filling.
Black teenager Moth lost her entire nuclear family in a bad accident. Who is she now, without her family to define her? Where she previously found solace in dance, to do so now feels too joyful and greedy. Moth is struggling with her identity and grief, feeling alone and uprooted. One day she meets a Navajo boy named Sani, from a differently-fractured family but also struggling with depression and uprootedness.
Sani and Moth set out on a road trip out West, technically to his father's home on the reservation, but in reality a zigzagging tour to find themselves and save the other. McBride's verse is gold that shines so brightly you need to sit with eyes shut and reflect on it. She sucks you in and grabs your guts and twists the story into something that both breaks your heart and fixes you. For grades 8 and up, this book is and should be for everyone. I don't do ratings, but this one gets every star in the universe.
Dawn Lanuza
Every once in a while she is convinced that she doesn't belong here anymore.
Yet she doesn't know where she should be just yet.
She finds herself where she is because she doesn't know where else to be.
These first lines in the second piece very much hit home (or someplace home is waiting) for me. A lovely yet inquiring collection that deals with themes of longing, loneliness, home, exploration, suicide (and living with someone who is suicidal - "I've never read your suicide letters. I've lived with them instead."), surviving v. living, and various other branches that spring from these thoughts. From a few lines to a page, each packs a personal, thoughtful wallop.
Beautifully done, I highly recommend this collection for anyone who wonders or searches for SOMETHING - love, connection, meaning. The end of the piece quoted above is where I felt the poems connected, even though it's the second in order:
Sometimes, when she's in a new place, wandering and learning its streets, she just hears herself sighing, I must belong somewhere.
She hasn't found it yet,
but she hasn't given up on the idea of it.
This cover is a work of art and I could not turn away. I also assumed (which is much of the cover gut operation) this collection would be steeped in nature, which it was. It was also a collection that, while quite patently excellent, was over my head a bit. Even when I don't "get" poetry, there are always lines/passages that resonate, oftentimes quite deeply. This bit, for example, about virus-ridden deer victims of the automobile:
The pastor of grief and dreams waves them into the road, a suicidal gospel written on warm macadam.
Davis's nature is not all about beauty, and he writes the brutal side, human and animal, with prose that is lovely but doesn't mask the horror. A hunt, pedophilia, lynching, death, racism, immigration, man's destruction of the natural world--all laid bare without apology for the monsters we can be.
[W]ithout any shame, we construct machines that make a mountain disappear, no regard for the memory or souls of trees.
* * *
White men stole black bodies to chain below deck, the only light seeping in where chinking failed. Unlike them, Ursus learned to share the one soul the world gives freely.
If only men could see the beauty without museums, the dismemberment, the displays of paws, claws and eyes outside of sockets, bodies stuffed and set on wired legs, caricatures of the real thing.
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