Hartman writes beautifullyĪnd rigorously, and capably wields both wide and narrow looks at the lives ofīlack women in Philadelphia and New York at the turn of the 20th century, using Still working to gather coherent thoughts about it. Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, and am Just finished Saidiya Hartman’s latest, Wayward Otherwise, as the speaker asks in “The Dead Will Lead You,” “Who will embalm our bones?” This was one of the first books of poetry that both astounded and confounded me in the best way - stripped of artifice, I was frighteningly made visible to myself. “Lighting the shadow, a woman/ crawls out beneath her own war” because, after all, she must persist. Repeating images of fire, light and ash are juxtaposed with skin, flesh and blood. The collection traverses immense landscapes of trauma, grief and desire, as well as the determination to survive one’s physical and spiritual losses. Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Lighting The Shadow does much of the same, breathtaking work in poem after poem. Listener to face that ever-swinging pendulum between shame and need in the With haunting vocals, swell and contract. In fact, about this song plays with light and dark. Kind of woe that only a shattered heart recognizes as its shadow. At second five, a bass drum knocks on the door of this room andĪ few delicate acoustic guitar strings answer. & Found” opens with a single piano that I imagine is played in a low lit,Ĭavernous room. The first few seconds of Lianne La Havas’ “Lost But I think I’ll choose The National’s “All the Wine,” to pair with Loves You, because they both capture an inflated sense of accomplishment, a touch of mania that barely covers a sense of utter desolation. The speaker has recommendations, including Madonna’s “Get into the Groove,” David Bowie’s “Rebel, Rebel,” and Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” I love those three songs, and can definitely see myself waltzing into the dining room with a tray of macarons in my hands. Gambito follows the poem with “My Husband’s Lychee Macarons” a recipe-poem that begins with the missive, “Instead of eating Filipinos, make these and enjoy.” The six-page poem details the gargantuan task of making French macarons from scratch, concluding with instructions to serve the infamously temperamental dessert to a theme song of the reader’s choosing. Spain, which colonized the Philippines for more than 300 years-to make this hum The poem “Cento: Don’t Eat Filipinos!” uses a WikipediaĪrticle on Filipinos-a sweet snack food sold in European countries, including Immigration and family, with the consumption of brown immigrants in thisĬountry a definite hum in the background. I’m currently teaching Sarah Gambito’s Loves You in my poetry class, and it’s a sardonic, jubilantĬollection that utilizes recipes-most of them Filipino food recipes-toĬomplicate, contemplate Filipino/Filipino-American identity, postcoloniality, She writes in the title poem, “We’re so not-naughty, so tweet-missiles against injustice, but smiling / on the outside, waiting to pay dearly, subject to change.” Cruel Futures forces the reader to stop and think about where they are and to turn the corner, away from comfortable pacification, into the tumultuous world.
Giménez Smith wields irony much like we see in Habit rather than couple ennui with gain-laden guitar riffs and drum fills, however, these poems approach the absurdity of our current epoch with a critical eye, co-opting pop culture references to offer scathing assessment of where we are. Prada knockoffs, Niles from Frasier, privilege. All of this and more makes up the absurd cultural and political landscape that Carmen Giménez Smith sets her sights on in her poetry collection Cruel Futures. Though Habit is largely an exploration of coming-of-age monotony and introversion, Snail Mail deftly proves that this does not mean the music needs to be tedious or alienating. “Static Buzz,” for example, dwells in a feeling something like sinking, before the drums pick up and Jordan cries out until the song’s end. Lindsey Jordan’s whirring chord progressions and raw vocals, mellow and atmospheric, are present all throughout the six-song stretch, but nowhere do these tunes turn dull or cliché.
The opening track “Thinning” exemplifies this quite well. While the lyrics are about sickness and a desire to remain languid, the pop of the snare drum and the recurring guitar riff, somewhat reminiscent of Sonic Youth’s “Incinerate,” punctuates “Thinning” with a driving purpose. Whether withering in the sun, finding solitude in front of the television, or asking garden slugs about how they view sociability, Snail Mail’s 2016 EP Habit is constantly balancing both lethargy and fervor.
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