Book Review

Geography has never been so disastrously flexible. The geography of the world, while the literal, physical manifestations of it remain, are in flux as places and objects and structures and borders are in rearrangement. This instability, in the same way as an earthquake’s lingering impact can be seen in the bones of a building like a dry season in the rings of a tree, has its resonance in language. Asiya Wadud’s Mandible Wishbone Solvent approaches instability with a fervor and nuance acknowledging the inability for logical coherence while maintaining the transformative power of change. The book plays with form through poems that are, at their core, resistant to consistency, instead dancing through ekphrastic response, lyrical wandering, and fragmentary archiving. As one traverses Wadud’s syntactical geography, readers are then brought to rest and think cogently with a pair of essays on isthmus and drift.

With Wadud’s geography, there is a constant roving for connecting seemingly disparate thought-structures. This is seen in poems like “be a bridge over something” where she writes:

be a bridge over something

be a bridge over something

be echo or residue or green question

be a loose suture, extension and supplement be a primrose and covenant

be an image pinched and pruned turned oblong

I begin with this poem because, in the most devout sense, it is a nice poem. It issues a gentle command complicating how thorough a connection must be to be valuable, the images of the poem ranging from the constructed materials humanity made to be strong, to the softest and most organic components of the world. Throughout her poems, Wadud plays with the spacing and margins of a page constantly—never settling on a singular composition of poem. In “be a bridge over something,” Wadud’s spacing in the midst of concurrent images on connection serves as a physical reminder that connection occurs through being and is not dependent on distance between subjects.

Geographically, the connection that Wadud seems to be speaking toward and nurturing is psychic. There are all number of distances one can create amidst oneself on display through this collection: the distance between I and I; between intent and speech; between I and We. The work of Mandible Wishbone Solvent seems to take a taxonomy of attempts made toward connection. For instance, the poem “all excess bloomed then felled” contains the following excerpt:

I am forlorn walloped by my own fading memory that stills me shrill logic at the cell level then some. I am forlorn free from history or at least souvenirs and doves in my left hand I move them to my right hand they sleep all along align the timbers and let them speak

I am a paring knife, all violences betrothed to me in a dream last Sunday. My tongue knotted and tied—red ribbon at the uvula

why bother to speak when the creed is a shorn ribbon tattered and wayward?

This poem is shrouded in disconnections and inconsistencies in a way that makes me, eager reader that I am, want to ask it question after question. Why the singular comma after knife as opposed to the run-on and fragmentary logic of the rest of the poem? Why the return after uvula as opposed to the consistent end-of-line logic? Is time connective tissue or antagonistically severing? I juxtapose the previous poem with “be a bridge over something” to speak toward the range at which Wadud prods toward the current of psychic geography. Whereas “be a bridge” seems to speak to the possibility of connection, “all excess bloomed then felled” seems to speak more toward how fraught and taxed the concept of flexibility is for connectivity. The poem continues, “tongue, please speak to me—prayer at compline suffused in my last bones,”—here we have a poet whose psychic landscapes are in turmoil and yet language still must find ways to emanate from their mouth. It is reminiscent to the metaphysics of poets like Octavio Paz and their eternal struggle between needing to speak, speaking, regretting the inexactitudes by which speech simply cannot convey something toward an absolute. However, whereas Paz reached toward meaning in his woes toward language, Wadud serves deific connection.

In the penultimate stanza of “all excess bloomed then felled,” we are given the lines, “all excess bloomed in the mouth cut / vertically then the knife exacts the bloomed excess / from bone leaking excess fallacy loose grammar / earth’s last cavity every night eludes me.” Wadud’s lyric here is exemplary toward the metaphysical journey from that innermost conflict of a poet—speech—and the expansive, generative world by which it finds trouble within. This is what geography is for Wadud: from the mouth comes the excess of the earth, language.

Wadud discusses the conflict of language often in the images of some severing mechanism and the active efforts to bridge that severance. Her ekphrastic series speak to this effect immensely, such as in her cobalt mirror image poems. For example, in “cobalt mirror image 3,” she writes, “all my life I have had just one / body / it thrills me to watch my life through one dark lens,” responding to an image repeated within the book with this inward-looking element of language, the thrill of singularity. However, in the very next poem, “cobalt mirror image 4,” she writes,

battalion of one feels so lost and peaceful

holes and a mess at the very least

draped or high finish

bore barren

bore kindred

I love the complicated relation between barren and kindred, lost and peaceful. What subjects that would ordinarily spark fear are granted linguistic permission to serve alongside that which would be a delight, a reward. In the transformative responses to cobalt mirror image, Wadud speaks a poesis of the dissonant resolve of connection. That in knowing oneself and the limitations of oneself, one may, in fact, discover the dissolution of limitations.

The work of Mandible Wishbone Solvent finishes with a pair of essays, “Nearly any two things can cohere,” and “Drift.” They pose as counterweights for the drive for connection and repulsion that Wadud has played with in her lyric all along. Even then, or perhaps especially, when posed at the end of this work where language is so purposefully broken apart, I hesitate to regard them with the logical genre conventions of an essay. Instead, what these two writings yield is a resolution of balance: The mind of a poet is as easily occupied with the substantial and research-driven cognition of literal borders as it is with the intangible flows of the world. That language is just as purposeful in its representation of each of these states and serves as the reminder for all that in these most imperfect times, the drive for connection has never been made more manifest nor more necessary.