Book Review

“I choose right. I choose what’s right. / I choose left. I choose what’s left. I am the one / who soils my sheets and the one who cleans them,” Isabelle Baafi writes in “Exit Interview,” a poem that exemplifies the strength and perspicaciousness of her clever debut collection, Chaotic Good. Throughout the collection, Baafi incisively explores the complexity of identity, relationships, and reinvention. These poems play with language and time to sift through the experience of growing up, into, and out of a coupling, resulting in a collection that is not so much about the dissolution of a relationship as it is about the beauty and imagination inherent to self-determination.

Consisting of forty-seven poems organized into five titled parts, the collection follows an atypical narrative order: It opens with “Separation,” then “Childhood,” “Adolescence,” “Marriage,” and finally “Rebirth,” each section examining that stage of life. “Separation” opens with “The Mpemba Effect,” a poem that employs the metaphor of the counterintuitive “phenomenon in which hot water freezes faster than cold water.” In it, Baafi deftly demonstrates how the same elements that created passion and longing in the speaker’s relationship also caused its rapid decomposition by simply repeating the first sixteen lines in the second half of the poem in the opposite order. For example, the first strophe states:

I never hated anything so much. Not

you, the meal. I couldn’t stand

anyone but you. Waking up each day to

the soft press of your lips on mine as you left. Seeking

abandonments sweet enough to crave.

In the second strophe, the reversal reveals a new picture:

abandonments sweet enough to crave:

the soft press of your lips on mine as you left; seeking

anyone but you. Waking up each day to

you, the meal I couldn’t stand.

I never hated anything so much.

The “Separation” section includes several powerful allusions, including to Janus, the Roman god of transition, and poems written after poems by Irène P. Mathieu and Hanif Abdurraqib. The poem “Mamlambo, Marooned,” written after Vievee Francis’s “A Flight of Swiftlets Made Their Way In,” calls in the mamlambo, a shape-shifting, snake-like goddess from Zulu mythology who drowns and eats the brains of her victims. In Baafi’s feminist re-telling, the speaker empathizes with and feels called to join the mamlambo in the water, a refuge from abusive men, and to join in the drowning of her “sister wives” as a way to “release them from their bondage.”

The collection then moves into the speaker’s indelible experiences of childhood and adolescence, including familial relationships, the speaker’s sense of self as a Black girl, and her experience being sexualized. In “The Redemption of Vanity,” the speaker probes the “lies” she was told about her appearance, for example, “that my mother birthed me in a ditch / and when I fell to the ground I took on its hue” and notes their insidiousness, insightfully observing that “when a lie mutates, every thought adjacent to it / inherits its texture.” In the powerful and heartbreaking “Ouroboros,” the adult speaker worries about her adolescent performance as an internet camgirl resurfacing. In a series called “P___Y”, six poems (with titles such as “PUSHY,” “PIGGY,” and “PENNY”—and never the slang word a reader might guess) recount experiences with boys, peers, sexuality, and violence, each demonstrating Baafi’s skill with form, including a golden shovel, a ghazal, field composition, and a contrapuntal piece.

It is in the “Adolescence” section that I found one of my favorite examples of Baafi’s adroit play with language. In “Everything is going according to plane,” a projective verse poem in which the speaker feels she is a disappointment to her family, Baafi switches out key words for their near-homographs. For example:

I was rot the daughter she wanted—but

I stayed. I would slip motes under her door, confessing

everything I did wile she slept. The spilled milk

from a broken hug. The uncovered bread that went stare.

There is a voice recording of me at nine,

begging time to stop gushing me forward. But this poem

is me at my beast, I sweat.

The replacement of “rot” for “not,” “motes” for “notes,” “wile” for “while,” “hug” for “mug,” “beast” for “best,” and “sweat” for “swear” creates a disquieting expansion of meaning, a sense of something close to—but definitely not—right in the speaker’s childhood.

Baafi continues to novelly manipulate language in the collection’s final two sections, “Marriage” and “Rebirth.” In the poem entitled “GMT-1” (after William Gee’s “tomorrow my brother died”), Baafi adds the modal verb “will” before the simple past tense of a verb to demonstrate how the speaker had anticipated the infidelity of their partner after they learned of it: “I already know what you will did. // When it happens, you’ll flooded your mouth / with vodka, burned away the taste.” In “I’m Here/Gone (delete as appropriate),” Baafi creates a multiple choice of opposites to uncover how close a healthy union is to a dissolute one: “I thought about // that (joke/threat) you made—the one about the spider / who (worshipped/devoured) her mate after he fathered her child.”

In one of the collection’s final poems, “Sankofa” (from the Akan proverb meaning “it is not taboo to go back for what you left behind”), the speaker concludes that “This time and every time, I was the code I needed to find my way back.” With language that surprises and plays, Chaotic Good lyrically and adeptly demonstrates that the tragedy of familial and romantic heartbreak may only be as far from reinvention and self-determination as a subtle yet critical shift in words, and as close as within the one speaking them. Deft in its examination of empowerment and self-discovery, this collection is a smart, moving, and worthy read.