By presenting the reader with twenty-five different translations of the same poem—which deliberately raises questions about what it means for multiple poems to have “sameness,” or to come from the same “source” poem—de la Torre implicitly argues for the translations as a sort of palimpsest or layering-over.
That seems to be what Phillips sets out to do, to keep beginning, and that seems to be what he does throughout this very rewarding book that ends with a mass coronation.
What does it mean to be herself in this Mexican-American culture? The last section moves more toward answering this question.
The poems are muscular with allusion and wordplay, citing sources diverse as Old English poems and Winnie-the-Pooh. The syntax is equally rich, piling adjectives that jar against elusive nouns as if to make a point: the world is complicated and so are attempts to turn experience into meaning.
It’s no secret that the world is changing radically; from massive (and righteous) civil unrest to ecological devastation that is being dismissed or ignored, we can no longer be certain that how things appear is the truth, or that anything will remain as it is or seems for any length of time.
In Prageeta Sharma’s collection of poems, her husband’s sudden death makes vivid their emotional and personal differences. Her grieving is intense and messy. Without the other to complete her understanding of the space she occupies in the world, she is ghosted. “I feel you inside but not in space” she writes in “Between Sighs.”
At another point, she asserts, “The question is who to be writing this.” Writer, mother, farmer, teacher, wife, student, reader, traveler: Fishman is at one time or another all of these throughout this book. But first and foremost she is the poet the work has chosen her to be.
Photo by Dave Grubb My family asks me to try to deepen my voice, sitting at the dinner table, my sexuality a tapestry they are coming close to unthreading. I look down at my plate, moving fishbones with my fork, and beneath the mess of food, a print of hunters in red coats chasing the […]
Photo by Biodiversity Heritage Library In the end what I know about earth is what was sold to me. What I know about myself is what I wouldn’t buy. One man sold eels. They hung oddly muscular from the stand’s brow or just beveled on ice. It stands to reason an eel could meet the […]
We delight in the distractions of the circus, though we understand its wonders are illusions, our voyeurism and demand for entertainment perhaps culpable in the continued othering of those outside the sanctioned norm. And though we begin to see where the line between reality and dream have been laid, begin to see the structures that fix that line and by extension the barriers it creates, the us and the them, we choose to follow it.