Poetry Reviews

An Eye in Each Square

The artist Agnes Martin slips in and out of Lauren Camp’s An Eye in Each Square like a wraith, an invisible companion. “Must Learn Neither” introduces the book’s tripartite structure and its obsessions: “What I want / is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more.” Like Martin’s art, Camp’s is private and oblique, not confessional. The poet observes how the artist’s work “made / sacred an emptiness,” and if the poems are ekphrastic, they are also an invocation, a conversation, and the suture of “A line, a line: it never leaves you.” The book’s title is itself drawn from Martin’s description of a family potato farm in Michigan, “an eye in each square of a chequerboard field, all by hand.”

Camp’s poetry admits a stony absence: “the moon rising in the bone-field is more hole than stoic presence.” It can break into an unpunctuated sentence, syntax awry—not unlike Gertrude Stein, whom Martin admired. In “Line Break,” the artist’s “line . . . lets the artist unfinish weariness.” It isn’t difficult from the title to see how the poet’s process parallels the artist’s; Martin’s marks on canvas don’t yield meaning or consolation so much as the desire for an emotional response, but her repetitions were a way of “moving grief to the side.” Camp writes in an end note that Martin and her work remained an enigma, which was precisely what was needed: After having been diagnosed as schizophrenic, she was submitted to shock treatment and became both explorer and interrogator of the psyche.

“Trusting Space” is the longest poem in the book. It opens with the question of “How to ask for joy,” then follows the speaker through the quotidian and mystical events of her day—a cemetery’s “glances,” low water, the sky filled with apparitions: “It is imperative / to see how this is substantial.” Martin figures as both oracle and prophet who has “drawn hurt” and practices erasure—like a poet. Thus the speaker of these poems, who “had plundered past nervous,” is enlaced with the artist, who at last stops burning paintings she judges flawed.

In “Lecture on Nothing,” the speaker is caught in the “antique gaze of Agnes’ / eyes” while Martin “frames the room and the room where she sits is built reliable / around her.” Martin disappeared from an artists’ cooperative in lower Manhattan for New Mexico, building an adobe brick house and a log-cabin studio, a move alluded to in “Tremolo”: “When she quit the city / to break from her constant hysteria, Agnes promised herself the apology // of firmness.” In “Lecture on Nothing,” then, the poet is empowered as the artist inhabits the “reliable” world of her own making. It is, as another poem suggests, a “Self-Portrait with Agnes Martin,” both self-reflective and joined.

The last poem in the book, “White Flower,” observes birds rehearsing scales as “their voices wing out / abundant. /. . . / I unthink.” Martin was profoundly influenced by Zen Buddhism and Taoism, practicing no-thought through meditation. Camp deftly captures the reason why: not to deny the world’s peril but to calmly experience “pasture and idle. / . . . / To grow solace is to measure light / as a purpose.”

After his conversion to Christianity, W. H. Auden famously rewrote the closing of “September 1, 1939”: “We must love one another or die” to “love and die,” seeing it as no choice. Camp is less era-specific, but these are poems of our catastrophic time—of smoke and schism, love and abyss, vigil and disquiet. How one accommodates dread and the beauty of a world going on despite it may be unanswerable, but through her veers of thought and bracing opacity, Camp offers poems that attempt to articulate a response.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Fire-Rimmed Eden

Selected Poems

Lynn Lonidier
Edited by Julie R. Enszer
Sinister Wisdom ($25.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

A prolific poet of the San Francisco small press scene from the 1960s onwards, Lynn Lonidier (1937-1993) is virtually unknown today. No doubt this is due in part to the fact that she didn’t belong to any particular coterie. Even among lesbian poets, the crowd with whom she might most generally be associated, she always went her own way. As Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems testifies, her work is invariably unique, and all the more valuable for it, as it realizes an idiosyncratic sensibility.

Take the opening of “Sailorjig to Seapatchwoman” from A Lesbian Estate (Manroot Press, 1979):

Down the briny paths of rime,
            I join hands with an encrusted lion.

   Transpose a lion on a whale and have upheaval to the last
   tumescence of seadrop (water-holding speck of life) I am

Mid-Forty Woman    Deep tonnage tensor of wisdom    Weedpatch woman
with brio-bulge crop       mat       carpet island       Thicket       fishhooks
monster bites     Slew of parasites hang loose in the gold lion’s
mane      Hoar nest    Primeval catch    SeaROAR cRest sWell Woeforth
/PROMISE:       Green land grows on your bullback    wending invisible
harpoons R    uddy mantle of rush in Green Sea Contest

The jamming together of words here, along with the erratic spacing, spelling, and capitalization, achieve a dizzying yet effective presentation. There’s a clear sense that Lonidier writes the lines as she feels them arising within her, inflecting them with distinct emotive force; indeed, it reads irresistably like a performance script. While she may have had precursors from Dada to punk influencing her, her experimentation feels rooted in her own impulses.

Lonidier’s initial artistic inclination was musical in nature; she studied the cello before breaking away to poetry. Upon moving to the Bay Area, she became an early romantic partner of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, and the pair moved to San Diego in the ’60s before splitting up. They were immersed in the local arts scene, collaborating on several musical and art projects both together and with friends. Lonidier’s brother, the feted photographic artist Fred Lonidier, lived locally as well at the time (there are several terrific photos included in Fire-Rimmed Eden).

Lonidier lived elsewhere for periods of time, but she always returned to San Francisco. She was a founding member of the Women’s Building in the Mission District, where she also lived and worked as a public-school teacher, and the city’s environs continually triggered her imagination, as they have countless others over the years—as can be seen in this passage from “Bernal Hill,” originally contained in The Rhyme of the Ag-ed Mariness (Station Hill Press, 2001):

A tree-laced road leads to radar
screens overlying the Mission,
Morning sun timbres the bay—
Oakland— Berkeley— Mt. Tam—
in by breathtaking eye.

Fire-Rimmed Eden contains the vast majority of Lonidier’s poetry. There are selections from her earliest collections, Po Tree and The Female Freeway, and the substantial A Lesbian Estate is presented in full—as is the last collection she assembled in her lifetime, Clitoris Lost, along with excerpts from her Mayan travelogue Woman Explorer. Selections from the posthumous The Rhyme Of The Ag-Ed Mariness, assembled by her friend Janine Canan, round out the rest.

Lonidier’s earliest work features an insistence upon freely, and often wildly, wielding language in an unexpected, eyebrow raising manner. Her first collection, Po Tree (Berkeley Free Press, 1967), is more artist-zine than poetry book; between saddle-stapled covers, Lonider’s poems appear intermixed and superimposed among collages and drawings by sisters Betty and Shirley Wong (while the artwork is not reproduced here, notes at the bottom of relevant pages offer descriptions); the poems themselves are Dada-like in their playful stridency. Several are list-poems of unusual word-matches given in full capitals: “CONFETTI NIPPLE / HISHERS / MIND BLINDER / VENETIAN TUBE ROOM / GONDOLA GONADS / AUTOBLOMB / POOM /MOM HARASS HEROOT / GERMAN VICTROLA HOAR CAUSE / CHARTREUSE COMB JUICE.”

Among the central concerns of Lonidier’s poetry are gender, sexuality, and power. She avoids being overtly political or banner waving, however, keeping the focus on her direct experience. She writes what she knows:

In drive-ins movie foyers men’s magazines    they comment on my body
as though they owned me    are as familiar with my buttbreastthighs
as they are with    rings on their fingers    It’s not rape that they
heighten their bodies by removing mind earsmindfeelings    tossing
away the body they’ve mass-raped Because    I’m their perogrative
to imagine their penises are    rolled-up dollar bills in my
penny vagina

(from “The Boys At The Beach”)

In short, Lonidier doesn’t hold back. Her work has rough edges and non sequitur ruptures, which can leave readers hanging as to where she was headed; nevertheless, with every poem the impression remains that she has managed somehow to achieve her exact desired result. These are the poems as she would have them—no regrets and nothing vital left unsaid.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Unreal City

Mike Lala
Tupelo Press ($21.95)

by Peter Myers

“I want a holophrase,” declares Hope Mirrlees—a single word to denote a whole complex of ideas. Thus begins Paris: A Poem, a six-hundred-line eruption of avant-gardism now regarded as a modernist classic. Her holophrase could well be the title itself: “Paris,” in 1920, signified both a classicism on its deathbed and a frenetic, whiplash present, a free-fall into a future as garish and unassimilable as the city’s boulevards, street vendors, and neon lights. Mirrlees’s poem of urban flânerie was an attempt to capture centuries of history and culture (read: barbarism) piled atop each other, chaotically signifying the arrival of a new era and a new relation to time.

The Unreal City, Mike Lala’s second poetry collection, reprises Mirrlees’s method but swaps 1920’s Paris for present-day New York City. While The Unreal City remains entangled with the modernist era—the title alludes to The Waste Land, a poem published, it’s worth noting, three years after Paris—its preoccupations are decidedly contemporary. For Lala, the city is ground zero for both the violence of history’s erasure and the deluge of its return; it’s where social antagonisms stare each other down in “the maculate, moth-riddled / sodium-vapor street-lamp light.”

Lala’s poetic method is primarily one of depiction. The collection’s opening poem, “My Nudes,” is ekphrastic, a montage of art-historical bodies. But Lala tweaks the formula by adjoining multiple subjects to a single first-person pronoun; the boundaries between the nudes, and between art and audience, are blurred from the start. Thus we’re introduced to one of the book’s central preoccupations: the challenge of separating our own outlines from the historical forces that shape them.

In subsequent poems, the speaker adopts a posture akin to Mirrlees’s urban flaneur, bearing witness to a world-destroying appetite for wealth as they wander a maze of asphalt and blue-grey glass. “Elizabeth Street” is a catalogue of storefronts that doubles as lifestyle porn, a litany of all that’s found “on Liz / street of my patron-funded dreams.” A sampling: “Unis, Café Habana, Kit 228 and Steven Alan / Le Labo, Aesop, Clare V, Shott NYC, Me&Ro, / Albanese Rudolph, Emmett / McCarthy, Thomas Sires, then Todd Snyder.” Here Lala deftly navigates a tricky tonal strait. The fact that his speaker simultaneously craves everything his “patron-funded dreams” would grant him—the $50 soap, the $400 shirts—and finds those same “patrons” despicable registers not as a contradiction so much as a necessary resentment; the would-be patrons, after all, are the ones who made the world this way, engineered it to contort our desires into such monstrous shapes. Many of the storefronts Lala’s flaneur strolls past have long been closed, a testament to how these high-end stores and boutiques—a living index of the city’s transformation from a place where people live to a publicly-subsidized warehouse for excess capital—are no less safe from the market’s predations than the people who can barely afford to window-shop.

“Work,” a long poem of urban wandering and rumination, takes up the majority of The Unreal City’s pages. The poem pays explicit homage to Paris: Lala borrows Mirrlees’s opening line and recycles many of her formal experiments, including typographical jump cuts, unconventional text alignment, and the incorporation of found text. But whereas Mirrlees generally restricts her scavenging to her poem’s urban environs—storefronts and advertisements, overheard gossip—Lala quotes and interpolates from a litany of written sources, documented in the book’s copious endnotes. The poem’s most prominent source text, other than Paris, is Vergil’s Georgics, the Roman poet’s treatise on farm work and apiculture. Lala thus turns our attention toward a different relation to work, one which, from the approximate hell of our present, seems prudent, even virtuous. Here, the word work functions as Lala’s own holophrase, referring not just to labor, but to what comes of it—the work of art, say, shaped no less by the hands of the artist than by the forces which act on those hands.

Like The Unreal City’s shorter poems, the opening gesture of “Work” is to strafe the urban environment. Our flaneur-speaker notes rooftop cops, overhead jets, and, like Prufrock, his own footfalls on “certain half- / deserted streets.” But unlike Prufrock (or Eliot, for that matter), Lala’s speaker has a decidedly historical-materialist sensibility: “View down Wycoff; mist over spires. / The workmanship of these, of everything, is empire— / bodies, labor, and theft—a way of making money / in the blue alarm clock light, a holophrase.” Later, “Work” swerves from the metropole to the periphery, copping to the predatory extraction of land and labor that keeps the urban enterprise running:

You KNOW how it STARTS.
MONEY taught
human beings
to wrench up the SOIL with iron,
to hunt, fund, kill, till, drill, develop, and steal land from others.
NOW in resources EARTH is DEFICIENT
SWEAT & GREED
became
products
BREATH
of HISTORY.

“Work,” however, is far more than agitprop that pays mind to prosody (not that that would be so unwelcome). The elements of its composition—the formal debt to Mirrlees’s Paris; the interpolations of Eliot, Vergil, and others—become, as the poem unfolds, an elaboration of its argument. Lala takes as his epigraph a quote from Andreas Malm, noting that our current climate crisis isn’t the revenge of nature so much as “the revenge of historicity dressed in nature.” We are helpless against the past’s irruption into the present, even if the unreal city’s burnished surfaces, visual metaphors for the frictionless flow of capital, would lead us to think otherwise. Our present world cannot be disentangled from the regimes of violence and dispossession that built and sustain it. “Work,” in its own way, drags the past into plain sight; it’s the revenge of historicity dressed in language.

Cities, like poems, are at once bastions of unreality and a means to survive it; in its final pages, The Unreal City takes the shape of a directive to tip the balance of urban life toward the latter. It’s didactic, but in a way that rings true, animated by the conviction that it would be worthless to say it otherwise: “Death to the god of our owners. / Death of the shares of our holders. Death / to the futures that lead us toward death.” For Lala, our new futures must be built where it is we stand, “beneath the shade / of monoliths.”

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

One Bent Twig

Tricia Knoll
FutureCycle Press ($15.95)

by George Longenecker

Tricia Knoll’s newest collection One Bent Twig is all about trees, the natural world, regrowth, and contemplation. Images fall one after the other like leaves in autumn. These are skillfully crafted poems, interwoven so each one speaks to the others.

Knoll has connected with trees since she was a child: “I was a baby who grew up next to an elm tree / my father planted to shade my bedroom window.” In “Funeral in the Forest,” she eulogizes ancient maples “with tapping scars, stumps of lost limbs, and brown ridges”:

You stood here through Abenaki’s land claims,
cholera epidemics, Jim Crow, Hurricane Irene.
World wars. Women and the vote. Sap flowed . . .

Knoll writes with the best of poet-naturalists. Her personification of trees is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “Tree at my Window.” Her poems use various voices; in “You Never Forget the First Trees You Love,” she speaks to her younger self: “You used branches to climb higher / than authorities said you could / for the silence of the ash confessional.” And many poems are rich in metaphor: “At their feet, cast-off blouses, skirts and veils—crumpled / summer, last landings of a headband of leaves // . . . // turbans of snow under a horned moon.”

In “Faith,” Knoll speaks of a deeply rooted spirituality with humor and irony:

I am not the rib-bone
of an apple-chomping Adam.

The smell of apple blossom
promises pies and peels

I do not fear snakes.
I wear no sackcloth

bindings, white robes,
or a cross on a bronze chain.

One Bent Twig is a worthy addition to the poetry of trees. Not only does Knoll sow words; she also plants actual seeds: “I have planted forty-five trees, with hope / that each wears its crown in a grace.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

The Dog Years of Reeducation

Jianqing Zheng
Madville Publishing ($19.95)

by Michael Antonucci

To mark the hundredth anniversary of the Paris Commune in the People’s Republic of China, writers from People’s Daily, Red Flag, and Liberation Army Daily collaborated to produce a thirty-two-page pamphlet entitled Long Live the Victory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! In Commemoration of the Centenary of the Paris Commune (1971). Their slim volume celebrates the working-class revolutionaries who briefly seized power at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. Published during the fifth year of the Cultural Revolution, the study discusses the Paris Commune in terms of social and political experiments conducted in China between 1966 and 1976. In the pamphlet’s final chapter, for example, the writers proclaim, “In China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao Tsetung (sic) Thought and Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line are being integrated more and more deeply with revolutionary practice of the people in the hundreds of millions to become the greatest force in consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Shortly after this commemorative work appeared, poet Jianqing Zheng became a participant in this process. Having completed his high school level course in foreign language studies, Zheng was dispatched to the Chinese countryside to become a “zhinquing” or “educated youth.” In the introduction to his new volume of verse, The Dog Years of Reeducation, Zheng discusses his poetic reflections on the Cultural Revolution. Recognizing that his situation was by no means unique, he writes, “millions of middle school and high school graduates . . . were sent to the mountains and the countryside to receive reeducation from poor peasants.” Zheng explains that he arrived in his village with “a deep conviction that the zhiquing [he and other educated youth] would play some role in the transformation of rural China.” He continues, declaring that “this collection of poetry relives those reeducation years in the fields.”

To fulfill the poet’s project, Dog Years delivers a firsthand account of the Cultural Revolution’s later stages. Reflecting on this charged moment in twentieth-century Chinese history, Zheng’s verse animates expectant uncertainties that accompanied its varied and profound personal and political transitions. Throughout the volume, the poet assembles collective and individual events imprinting and informing his reeducation process. History and memory swirl and converge as Zheng’s poems trace these moments and movements; this dynamic becomes evident, for example, in “Star Watching,” a poem in the opening section. Illustrating Zheng’s ability to layer and combine his terse prose poetry with short, imagistic three-line bursts, “Star Watching” identifies the undercurrent of “static change” that informs the poet’s time in the provinces:

After graduating from a foreign language school in the Cultural Revolution, we have no choice but to go to the countryside . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            roosters crowing
            another day of life
            in the village

At night, our life is as flat as our farm work, tasteless as rice and pickled turnips we eat each day. No books to read, no chess to play . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            autumn night
            lying on rice stacks
            counting stars

As the poet comes to terms with the monotonous simplicity that he faced along with the other zhinquing, “Star Watching” offers readers a perspective on everyday life in rural China during the mid-1970s. Like other poems from the opening section of Dog Years, such as “Lunchtime,” “Transplanting Seedlings,” and “Cutting,” the poet uses “Star Watching” to stare down the stern conditions that informed what he calls “my farm life.”

This cycle of back-breaking labor—punctuated with heat, dust, sweat, cold, rain, insects, and animals—shapes Zheng’s verse; Dog Years thereby constructs a collage of memory that charts the poet’s pathway along his journey of return. Some points of return are embraced; others are not. Yet, these returns—even those that are distasteful and unwelcoming—provide both the poet and his readers with a measure of perspective on events relating to the Cultural Revolution. Ultimately, this past and its enduring imprint allows Zheng to consider his circumstances in full measure. For example, reflecting on village life in the poem “Life in the Fields,” he writes, “Those years are like /a yellowed book,” before going on to deepen the metaphor:

Turning each page
is like unwrapping
an unearthed mummy,
dried but well preserved.

Through lines such as these, the known, the predictable, and the inevitable coalesce, forming the foundation of Zheng’s reeducation process. By doing so, the poet situates himself and other members of his zhinquing cohort—Pigsy, Yi, Pearl—among the farmers, fields, and fixed chore lists that inform the certainties of daybreak and sunset, planting and harvest. Similarly, in “The Lesson Learned,” the poet extends his exploration of these binary constants:

When day and night
revolve like the duality
of yin and yang
way and no way
exertion and relaxation
positivity and negativity
earth and heaven
man and woman
dream and daydream

we begin to see
reeducation as a coat
altered to wear,
a fate to face and
a life to live.

Across four sections, Dog Years of Reeducation collects and arranges Zheng’s “lessons learned.” Unfolding with the measured successions of seasons, his poetry grapples with the idea of return, tracing its halting, bounded limits. This pattern is made fully evident in the volume’s third section; after opening with the three-line epigraph, “homesick / a seesaw creeks / up and down,” Zheng continues his poetic meditations on space, time, distance, and the reeducation process in the verse that follows. For example, in “The Gradation of Our Being,” he proclaims, “We no longer look like a group / of urban youths,” and in “Question,” he asks:

Is this expansive flatland
where the flower drum song

roots deep and spreads wide,
where the sunset

promises a new dawn,
where cotton is handpicked

and rice is hand planted,
where rain is the source of life

also a dreamland studded
with starry wishes?

At the same time, throughout the third section of Dog Years, Zheng’s poetic examination of personal experience intersects with conversations relating to Chinese history and politics. These connections emerge most significantly through the course of poems that explore the death of Mao Zedong.

Mao died while Zheng was working in the fields, late in the summer of 1976. The poet recalls the moment he learned of Mao’s passing: “we were picking cotton when a farmer // came over announcing, ‘Mao died.’ / His voice was a cool autumn breeze.” Zheng redoubles his reflections on his life and Mao’s death in “Maostalgia,” the second part of this loosely constructed tryptic; its opening line reads, “I lost my voice in the Cultural Revolution.” He continues: “I answered Mao’s call and went to the countryside to rebuild my body for strong bones and muscles.” In the second stanza, he writes: “I heard of Mao’s death while picking cotton. I was hungry that afternoon; I cursed the sun for not sinking faster.” The poem concludes as Zheng balances these two prose blocks on three imagistic lines that project both poet and reader into a future moment:

Great Wall tour—
each souvenir stall sells
Chairman Mao badges

The Mao study concludes with “Shouting”; identifying the waning energies of the Cultural Revolution, this poem recalls the “village chief” leading a meeting “in October 1976, a month after / Chairman Mao’s death.” Having gathered the villagers and zhiquing “on the threshing floor,” the chief delivers “a long editorial that / endorsed the new leader.” The poet writes that his uninspiring words “sounded as flat / as an unsalted dish,” leading the villagers “to chat,” with their voices “buzzing // like a swarm of mosquitos.” The chief, in turn, is desperate to regain the villagers’ attention:

                                    . . . he thundered

“Long Live Chairman Mao!”
            into the microphone. As if

awakened, we all stretched our arms
            to yawn the slogan after him.

Throughout the volume’s fourth and closing section, Zheng delivers a set of equivocal summary reflections on his time in the Chinese countryside. However, it is in “Looking Back” that the poet—who has lived in Mississippi since 1991, teaching in the English Department of Mississippi Valley State University—provides his audience with some of his deepest insights into his reeducation process. After making use of variations on the phrase “If I / never” in four of the poem’s five stanzas, “Looking Back” concludes with a proclamation:

if all this
never was a part of reeducation, I could
never relate grains to drops of sweat and
never imagine the oil lamp as the light of hope.

Five decades have long gone.
My body has become a rusty plow.
Some nights I dream of tilling at sunrise or
reading in the deep night with a desire
to turn to a new page of life.

In this way, having arrived at a point of deep reflection, the poet speaks back to his “dog years”—an era that is, at once, lost and found— with images and “memories tempered / hard and sharp with pains.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Emerald Wounds

Selected Poems

Joyce Mansour
Translated by Emilie Moorhouse
City Lights ($22.95)

by Allan Graubard

Erotic, subversive, sensual, vivacious, defiant, fragile, satirical, ironic, lyrical, eruptive, heretical, anguished, sexy, and buoyant are just some of the words that come to mind when considering the poetry of Joyce Mansour. Certainly there are other words that readers will conjure. Have I left out odorous and sweaty, given Mansour’s embrace of the body as a ground her poems take root in and burst from? And what about her body, the female body, in a world run by men? Add in the complexities of passion, love, marriage, family, and exile, and readers will find that Mansour creates a rich and spicy gumbo in these Selected Poems.

From her first book, 1953’s Cris/Screams, to her last, Trous Noirs/Black Holes, published in France in 1986, the year of her death, Mansour will delight those with her, or those willing to be touched by her, while scandalizing others for whom custom and behavior are sacrosanct. Throughout her body of work, Mansour’s titular “emerald wounds” blossom and ensnare, even as they live and die, because they sing—this is a world ripe with magic, the kind that exalts and transforms by the power of words.

Long associated with the Paris surrealist group, Mansour in this new translation lives with a currency that is as striking as it is needed, especially when women’s free expression of desire, sex, and autonomy still militate against the enduring pivots of misogyny, whether intimate or institutionalized. Indeed, the fifteen-year lapse between this, Emile Moorhouse’s effort, and a similarly configured translation of Mansour’s writings by Serge Gavronsky (Black Widow Press, 2008) has, it seems, done little to eviscerate men’s desire to control women, so embedded in the social fabric it is, with deadly consequence all too often.

But a brief history. Born in England in 1928 as Joyce Patricia Adès to a wealthy family of Jewish-Syrian descent, she is raised in Cairo; her language English. Later, with her second husband who speaks only French, she will change, adopting French as her Rosetta Stone. Her poems, as she describes them, originate as screams or cries, the aforementioned title to her first book. They rise through her as the traditional mourning wails of Egyptian women do, sibilant, yearning, and sharp. Do her poems then function as a form of “exorcism,” as Moorhouse notes, of the dual traumas Mansour suffered when young: the death of her mother when she was fifteen and the sudden death of her first husband six months after their honeymoon, both from cancer? Perhaps. But it does not end there. If exorcism is a therapeutic medium born from trauma, the metamorphic and liberating charge of Mansour’s poetry leads.

By the early 1950s she circulates among Cairo’s avant-garde where, oddly enough, French, a colonial appendage, is the literary tongue. Political change, though, forces their move to Paris where her first book, Cris/Screams, draws the praise of André Breton, who identifies Mansour as one of the three most significant poets to emerge after World War II. From then on Mansour participates in the activities of the surrealist group, publishing in their journals and collaborating with some of their major and allied artists: Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Hans Bellmer, Pierre Alechinsky, and others.

Emerald Wounds, with its 100-plus poems across ten of Mansour’s books, gives readers generous access into her world, emotional, vulnerable, and (as Alfred Jarry would say) umorous. A detailed introduction sets the stage while pointing out that, despite the potency Mansour commands, she is more often overlooked in the larger literary landscape. As for these translations, they perform well enough, beyond some awkward phrasings and word choices.

The first poem in Cris/Screams startles. From the sensitive opening, perhaps referring to the death of and funeral for her young husband—“I lift you in my arms / For the last time”—the corpse in its coffin “moving in your narrow world”—comes this implacable image that not only avoids cheap sentiment but also heightens the emotional stakes. For this corpse has its “head removed from your slit throat.” A concluding riposte to it all resonates with the bitterness of aborted passion: “It is the beginning of eternity.”

When it comes to sex, a convulsionary paradise, Mansour is ever explicit; the theme enriches throughout her work, as in the final poem from Cris/Screams:

May my breasts provoke you
I want your rage.
I want to see your eyes thicken
Your cheeks turn white as they sink.
I want your shudders.
I want you to burst between my thighs
That my desires be satiated on the fertile soil
Of your shameless body.

In her second book, Déschirures/Shreds, from 1955, the poems gain broader social reach and read as if written today in response to the oppressive cabal of racism and class:

Cry little man
Your boat is for sale
Your wife is sold
And the fresh milk of your cow
Red with the blood of blacks
Makes your children piss
Their hate

And then just a few pages on, pivoting to the sexual shivers that inspire her, is one of her most poignant poems. It begins this way:

I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow
Hair entwined
Genitals enlaced
With your mouth as a pillow

And ends in raked diminuendo:

Consumed by the wild inertia of bliss
Splayed on your shadow
Pounded by your tongue
And to die between the rotted teeth of a rabbit
Contented.

The third section includes twelve prose pieces and poems that Mansour published in Bief: Jonction Surrealiste, a modest Parisian journal, from 1958-1960. Satire plays deftly with an opening salvo: a comedic critique of heterosexuality that deforms the traditional meaning of its title. “The Missal of the Missus (Good Nights)” evolves in three parts, each translating the rules and rituals of the Catholic mass into something else; something they would never otherwise have been used for. The subtext of the first part, “Advice for Running on Four Wheels,” reveals the poet’s body as a car cruising at night hot with desire, and what a woman can do during sex to ensure her lover’s satisfaction. The second part, “Cold Out? A Dress Is Essential,” refers to fabric spun from flayed “moorish” skin, “two tea towels” worth, and how to appear beautiful when wearing it. Savagery is just beside the point. The third section, “Lines Around a Circle,” is a pastiche of fashion magazine dictates where you must “Straighten the silhouette without crushing the organs.”

Included as well is Mansour’s take on gossipy female advice columns with some “Practical Advice While You Wait”; that is, for your man—when in a train station, a restaurant, a city hall, or at home. No matter being worried or jealous, the commandment is clear: The woman must stay “pretty, relaxed, sharp . . .” But don’t “wait in the streets” and always wait for the heart of the conflict steaming up “amongst the reddened leaves and the caramel fumes of your discriminations.”

Husband neglecting you? “Dowsing” has a cure: “Invite his mother to sleep in your room.” Want something more? Okay: “Piss in his soup when he lies down happily next to you.” And then, “Be gentle but skillful stuffing the fat goose / With octopus messages / And mandrake roots.” In the end, however, the wife needs what she doesn’t get from him:

Motionless like a mollusk flatulent with music
Clings to the telephone
And cries
In spite of myself my carrion fanatacizes over your ousted old cock
That sleeps

These poems give a sense of the breadth of Mansour’s writing, which can shift, implicitly or explicitly, from personal to social, cultural, and political contexts with ease, and from brief to magnetic longer poems in her later collections, such as “Endlessly Midnight,” “Pandemonium,” and, the finale, “Black Holes.” Although seduction and orgasm fuel her poems, there is a parallel motif of disgust and pain that illuminates a depth of embodiment and humanity. If we are wounded by the repressions and oppressions that stalk us, Mansour indeed turns those hurts into dark and precious jewels.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Motherfield

Julia Cimafiejeva
Translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib
Deep Vellum ($18.95)

by Jessica Johnson

The first collection available in English by Belarusian poet, translator, and editor Julia Cimafiejeva, Motherfield begins with approximately thirty pages of the author’s year-long protest diary, composed in English during a mass uprising around the 2020 presidential election in Belarus; authoritarian leader Alexandr Lukashenko, in power since 1994, retained it in elections the E.U. deemed illegitimate. Cimafiejeva’s poems, translated from Belarusian by the impressive team of Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib, follow the diary, concluding with a single poem composed in English.

The diary feels written for the gaze of readers outside the events, possibly as a record in case something happens to the author. For some American readers, it will hold flashes of recognition—particularly the difficult feelings that come from continuing literary life and experiencing respites of comfort and safety during a political crisis—as well as an abundance of chilling occurrences that don’t (yet) happen here (for example, widespread internet outages as a government tactic).

Offering historical, political, and personal context to the poems that follow it, the diary is an activist’s account, but it is also a poet’s account; some of its moves and images linger and react with the poems’ more distilled elements. Of the dubious polling station where she will cast her vote, Cimafiejeva writes, “Every election day in Lukashenka’s Belarus has turned into a demonstration of the cheap and vulgar aesthetics of his power.” Her description settles on a

teenage girl in a pseudo-folk costume with a wreath on her head . . . singing about her love for the Motherland, passionately clenching a microphone. Her Russian song checks off the golden wheat fields, the big blue lakes, and the slender white storks flying over our heads. She sings that we all live safely and peacefully in our beloved Belarus.

Here Cimafiejeva shows the propagandist’s Russian-language vision of the Motherland, one that the poems will meaningfully subvert to include ecological disaster, disconnection, and stifled expression. Cimafiejeva was born in 1981 in a region of Belarus that became part of the Chernobyl zone during her childhood. Her poetry develops, often through extended metaphor, a concept of bleak, devastated embodiment with disrupted relationships between past and future, land and people, people and language.

In the opening poem, “The Stone of Fear,” the speaker’s inheritance is “a trust fund / of fear” in the form of a stone. The stone is mute and without memory, “an eternally slow-growing / embryo.” To nurse it, its inheritors must “unlearn” how to breathe, “how to say what needs to be said.” In place of nurture and natural cycles of rebirth, Cimafiejeva finds intergenerational reproduction of something wrong.

While ecological devastation, absence of language, and reproductive bodies feature in the metaphors that drive many of these poems, references to Chernobyl also appear more literally. In “Rocking the Devil,” children swing their feet at a bus stop bench; it begins to rain and the girls stick out their tongues, but no one knows the raindrops are “disastrous,” that they’ve already permeated the scene’s vibrant flora. When the bus takes the girls away, the trees wave goodbye. Similarly, “1986” is written from the perspective of a “we” who had to leave houses, crops, and graves. Strangers dismantle their homes and what remains of their lives in the ancestral village; when they come back to visit, the land does not forgive them.

If the diary operates in one register of documentary, the poems work in others, but several moments in the poems call back to the diary. “My First City, Zhlobin” portrays a steel-producing town as a body that nurtures ruin:

I fear your children, Zhlobin,
the steel-cast children
of Zhlobin
nursed by the factory’s
smoggy tits.

The speaker here, fed on the factory’s black milk, emits rust, whereas the body in Cimafiejeva’s diary observation “I feel safe inside the body of a crowd”—the body of people gathered in protest, sharing water and food and generally looking after each other—can be read as a counterpoint to the blighted bodies of the poems.

Also thought-provoking is the diary entry for October 17-18, when Cimafiejeva and her husband, a novelist, are at a literary festival launching their books. He draws a crowd, but she doesn’t. She writes, “My new poetry book was published a few days before the election. It was the worst time: no one is interested in a tiny poetry book when the main news is deaths, beatings, and detentions. But there is no other time.” This moment highlights the question of poetry’s connection to lived and recorded history, a question enacted again by the arrangement of the book itself.

That arrangement comes to a crescendo with “My European Poem,” which closes the book. It speaks to the possibility of being read by an international audience and being placed among writers working in less challenging political conditions. Of Belarusian history, Cimafiejeva writes,

When I tell it in English,
I want to pretend that I am you,
That I don’t have that painful experience
Of constant protesting and constant failing,
That nasty feeling of frustration and dismay.

In the end the speaker keeps a “beaten hope” that “builds its nest / On my roof and sings / In Belarusian.” This poem, unlike others, is dated: August 5, 2020, just before the election, before the crackdown, before the president remained, again, in power. The beginning is at the end, enacting the cyclical nature of the “beaten hope” the poem names.

Yet if Motherfield’s final poem relies on the protest diary for context, the poems that precede it—their images of wordlessness, thwarted regeneration, and ecological catastrophe—give the book its depth, and announce Julia Cimafiejeva as a poet that English language readers will want to follow in the future.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Translated by David Colmer
New York Review Books ($18)

by Thomas Moody

Walking on the beach he gets an idea
and immediately guesses its incorrectness
—“Method”

Nachoem M. Wijnberg’s poetry possesses the disconcerting quality of being at once extraordinarily strange and very close to the feeling of life as it is actually lived. Wijnberg brings the world close to us (and it is a sweeping world he attends to: religious and philosophical investigations, encounters with historical figures, and domestic affairs of the most trivial nature) by being exact about the indecisiveness of the human will and by favoring the processes of our understanding of experience over the particulars of experience itself. Take “Letter to the Corinthians”:

Awareness of the world as well as ourselves
is as difficult for us as self-awareness for fish or foxes
although they in their behavior take their own existence
into account as we do the existence of the world.

These poems deal with the obstacles we face in “taking into account . . . the existence of the world”: the incompatibility of desires, the misapplication of attention, the strangeness of the other (particularly when the other is familiar), and the oddity of the revealed self. Here’s the opening to “Replying”:

Starting with what is the same for everyone

or can be (can everyone come over here),
looking at oneself and leaving out what reminds
one of oneself
to be able to say what can be said

without waiting until the same thing has been said in reply.

Understanding and loving, so that one of the two
can rest while the other watches.
Having the courage to say when no one is there:

how I wanted to live is incomprehensible to me
but maybe not to everyone.

Wijnberg is a professor of business studies at the University of Amsterdam; value systems, and our attempts to ascribe them coherently, are recurring themes throughout his poetry (“Continuing with what I do, recognizing what might be important enough to / justify putting everything I have into it — both of those are brave, aren’t they?”). Over the course of the twenty volumes collected here, from 1989’s The Simulation of Creation to 2022’s Naming Names, there is arguably little in the way of formal inventiveness—we are presented with songs, jokes, parables and ghazals—however, Wijnberg’s approach doesn’t require new forms to astonish; his singular voice makes existing forms seem new.

This is due partly to Wijnberg’s casual poetic register, which flattens any hierarchy of concepts and abolishes the mind’s value rankings of the quotidian and the profound. “Power and Knowledge and Justice,” a meditation on the existence of God, reduces the divine to a doorman “who does have power / over you but not much, and you can take a lot of it away by walking off and / standing somewhere else.” The poem opens:

Imagine there is someone far away who has almost no power but loves us—
our existence matters to him and he wants to know as much as possible about
each of us.
Or else he could have power but has set the condition that he only wants to
know that much if he doesn’t have to have power.
If you have had a lot of power, you can never give it back entirely, you still
know something about how it works.

Such cursory language unmoors us; it reproduces the disorientation we experience when thinking about such enigmatic concepts. Much of this is achieved through Wijnberg’s syntax, which employs a bewildering repetition of pronouns (especially “it”) with their exact referents often difficult to determine, as well as run-on sentences and other devices to produce complex layers of meaning. Take, for instance, the short poem “What an Actor the World Has Lost in You”:

An actor on another actor: he turned from left to right and stopped, at the
same time gesturing with his hand.
Being an actor was unbearably lonely if no one noticed him doing it, the chill
from its beauty went right through me.
Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that, a bad
actor can do it now and then, only a very good actor can do it all the time.
They are acting and they go on for too long or stop suddenly and you can see
they’re glad to be allowed to stop.

We are never entirely certain what any of the four “its” are. The poem seems to turn on the line “Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that,” but Wijnberg leaves us unsure as to which of the referents in the previous lines “that” refers to. This uncertainty destabilizes us as readers, but it replicates our understanding of the world as we experience it, and the accompanying feelings of surprise, confusion, and disorientation. To create such ambiguity through simplicity is Wijnberg’s greatest talent as a poet.

Increasing this uncertainty is the way the logic of many of these poems progress. Wijnberg’s associations often have no obvious point of contrast or connection; his declarative sentences are always slightly askew and his statements are just shy of making sense—close enough to be intelligible, far away enough to be obscure: “A poem must be about something; otherwise no one can say / if the poem is superfluous if it is about him. // What can he say, what is in his heart: a poem if one is bigger than the other, / disappointed if it is not a good poem.” His poems register the large impact of small differences.

They also make innovative use of those things we normally associate with poetic effect. Wijnberg’s rare similes are paradoxical in nature: “like wanting to fight / far above your weight, / but not against someone else”; “More reason to assume / someone is the Messiah / when he arrives / like someone politely leaving / at the earliest possible moment.” He also has an obvious talent for aphorism—“Where words mean something, Ghalib’s are law”; “No one knows what desire is until Ghalib says something about it. / He reads the history of the world and when he is finished, he says what is / missing”—though he rarely utilizes it, perhaps because this kind of rhetoric tends to take the reader out of the poem, or make us realize we are in a poem, devolving the feeling of lived experience into literature about it.

Perhaps it is fitting that one of Wijnberg’s most convincing and effective modes is that of the parable. Take “Laziness and Patience,” which echoes the Biblical story of the prodigal son:

The three sons of the father who says that when he dies,
The entire inheritance will go to the laziest son.
A judge has to find out which of the sons is the laziest.
The first son says: I go quiet when I think someone loves me.
That’s not bad, especially the haste, like someone
who has come to tell someone they don’t love them.
The second son says: my father has worked hard his whole life
to say that the inheritance goes to the laziest son
and that it’s up to a judge to find out which son
is laziest. If it was more I know what I’d do,
says the third son to the woman he spends the inheritance with
in just one night. The woman tells the judge.
The judge asks the son: how did you know that she was the woman
who would tell me about it?

Auden wrote that anyone who attempts to interpret a parable only ends up revealing themselves, but Wijnberg’s poetry compels us to try by asking us to find our bearings in disorientation. Here as elsewhere we might conclude that Modernity, with its pitch of distraction, its savagery masked in convenience, and its slogan- and corporate argot-riddled double-speak, forces us into constantly making sense of the world through the nonsensical. Confusion is our natural state, Wijnberg’s poetry confirms, and where we find meaning.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses

Ronald Johnson
The Song Cave ($18.95)

Book Review, Poetry Reviews

by Ross Hair

First published in 1969, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, Ronald Johnson’s third book of poetry, consolidates the strengths of his earlier work while foreshadowing his epic poem ARK, which he began writing in 1970. The book is comprised of two parts; the first, “A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees,” consists of a selection of poems from Johnson’s 1964 debut volume of the same title, and the second, “The Different Musics,” collects poems Johnson wrote between 1966 and 1967. The title of Johnson’s book is taken from the Valley conjured in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Eleanora”—an idyllic place where, amidst its “thousands of forest trees” and “many millions of fragrant flowers,” the story’s narrator dwells with his cousin Eleanor and her mother.

Existing somewhere between scrupulously observed fact and visionary transmutation, the worlds evoked in “A Line of Poetry” are not only as luxuriant as Poe’s Valley, but also as utopic. “This is the Garden,” Johnson writes in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” “where all is a poet’s / topiary. Where even the trees / shall have tongues, green aviaries, / to rustle at his will”:

Here—
both lines of poetry, rows
of trees,
shall spring all

seasons
out ‘of the lust of

the earth,
without
a formal seed’.

In “Four Orphic Poems” we find the poet evoking Thoreau—one of several Transcendentalists that inform the poems in Johnson’s Valley—as they attempt to read the Book of Nature:

& I (like
Thoreau) sit here engrossed,

‘between a microscopic & a telescopic
world’,
attempting to read

the twigged, branchy writing

of frost, spider & galactic cluster.

As well as reading nature’s “green / script,” Johnson also reads what others before him (poets, botanists, painters, composers, scientists) have written about it. Thus, throughout the book he liberally quotes the words of others, plotting his transplanted material on the page with the care of a gardener who seeks “clear space // to cultivate // the Wild, Espaliered, Tangled, / Clipped // estate.” However, compared to the open field collage poetics of the Black Mountain poets, Johnson foregoes extemporization for a more proportioned, more serene approach to composition that circumvents the bluster his older peers could be prone to.

As much as the poems comprising “The Different Musics” continue Johnson’s fascination for the “sweet proportion / & order” of both micro- and macrocosm, they also more explicitly acknowledge the sensual, erotic forces—the “rude / & stammering / organs”—by which “NATURE CONSPIRES.” Whereas in “A Line of Poetry” we find sowers, including Johnny Appleseed, casting their seeds in dark fields, and sunflowers “heavy in the head, with / seed,” in “The Different Musics” propagation assumes more phallic proportions. This is evident in Johnson’s series of ekphrastic poems on the dream-like jungle scenes created by French painter Henri Rousseau. “The Snake Charmer,” for example, depicts Rousseau’s eponymous subject, a “flautist of the sinuous phallus,” amidst a lush amatory landscape wherein “two pale fox-gloves secretly erect themselves, // deeper within the thicket” and “soft, foliaceous / labials” suggest fellatio.

The erotic charge of “The Different Musics,” and the new perspective it brings to Johnson’s cosmopoiesis, recalls the transfiguration that the Valley in Poe’s “Eleanora” undergoes following the sexual awakening of the story’s young protagonists. “A change fell upon all things,” Poe’s narrator writes: “And life arose in our paths; for the tall flamingo, hitherto unseen, with all gay glowing birds, flaunted his scarlet plumage before us.” As the young lovers’ sexual awareness burgeons and grows, new strange flowers blossom on the trees in the Valley and “ruby-red asphodel” (an omen of morality) grows where before were only daisies.

In “The Different Musics” this correspondence between sexual agency and a heightened perception of “the great grassy world” is evident in “Letters to Walt Whitman,” a suite of ten poems that answer the poet’s Leaves of Grass. “But I have come O Walt,” Johnson writes in Letter III, “for the interchange, promised, of calamus, / masculine, sweet-smelling root, / between us”:

Calamus, ‘sweet flag’,
that still thrusts itself up,

that seasonally thrusts itself up for lovers.

This “interchange” often occurs via homonyms and double-entendres. In Letter II, for example, “the vast organic slough / of the earth, / the exquisite eye / —as myriad upon myriad of dandelions— // seeding itself on the air,” adumbrates the ejaculatory act implicit in the foregoing exhortation: “I have come O Whitman.” At the same time, such dissemination also speaks to “the intimate kernel,” the germinal life force, of the “ample prairie” that is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “The intimate kernel putting forth final leaf // from The Valley Of The Many-Colored Grasses.” Here, “leaf” suggests both a “stalk of grass” and the page of a book: Whitman’s, Johnson’s, and Nature’s.

Johnson writes in “Letters to Walt Whitman” of having “lain in the open night // till my shoulders felt twin roots, & the tree of my sight / swayed, / among the stars.” A similar fusion is evoked in Johnson’s earlier poem, which quotes Henry David Thoreau’s elegiac essay “Autumnal Tints”:

            ‘When Men Will Lie Down
                        as Gracefully & as Ripe—

            with such an Indian-summer serenity
            will shed their bodies
            as they do their hair & nails’.

Fall leaves, Thoreau (dying of tuberculosis at the time) writes, “teach us how to die.” For, Johnson, however, who omits a portion of Thoreau’s original text—“One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully”—this image of recumbent men shuns the hubris of immortality for the more modest grace and fecundity of seasonal time and change; the “subtler harmonies, coming of growth / & of death.”

The reclining figures in both of Johnson’s poems are repeated on the cover of this beautiful new edition of Valley, which uses a photograph by Johnson’s friend Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Meatyard’s multiple-exposure technique makes his male subject appear to fuse with (or dissolve into) the rocky terrain about him. If this recalls the way in which the poet in “The Different Musics,” searching the dictionary, humbly finds “among DUST / vapor, storm, breath, smoke: // ‘the earthly remains of bodies once alive— / a confusion— / a single particle, as of earth,’” it also reiterates the affirmation that Johnson expresses throughout his book for the largesse of life itself. To have this book finally back in print, and reminding us of such verities, is simply a splendid thing.

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Quarantine Highway

Millicent Borges Accardi
Flowersong Press ($16)

Book Review, Poetry Reviews

by Hilary Sideris

Quarantine Highway, the fourth poetry collection by the Portuguese-American poet Millicent Borges Accardi, was written in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a group of thirty Latinx poets participated in a challenge organized by the organization CantoMundo—writing, reading, and riffing on each other’s poems for thirty days. Borges Accardi captures the sheer panic and magical thinking of that time when Covid was at its most mysterious and deadly, and she shows us a community coming together to document and process the absurdity (and, at times, the strange beauty) of pandemic life, taking comfort and inspiration from each other’s raw emotions and rough drafts.

In the poem “Yes, It’s Difficult,” Borges Accardi lapses into nostalgia for the pre-pandemic world of unfettered travel and spontaneous shows of affection: “it was how we did things then, / dirty and up close and we breathed on each other / sighing air, sipping in fine water droplets.” The poet daydreams of travel in “She Can Do What She has to Do,” finding herself “in a café that I know does not exist, / on a corner in make-believe Paris,” where she watches people pass in the plaza. “Thank you,” she tells the imaginary garçon,

I would love a piece of cheese and some
bread. The drink is cool, so I feel as if
the story of my life can go on forever.

Not surprisingly, a reckoning with fragility and the monotony of living a cautious life dominates the collection. In “All It Takes,” the poet fights off an ant infestation, while outside, bodies stack up in refrigerated trucks. Borges Accardi’s gaze falls on a line of ants carrying their dead across her kitchen floor:

You drink cod liver oil and chant
Go home go home go home as the
ants pick up their dead and march
backwards to their queen.

Even as she attempts to ward off the invaders, the poet recognizes that they, too, are members of a community facing an existential threat. But the kitchen is also a site of hope: Cooking and baking are rituals that engage Borges Accardi in a sensual world where well-being is possible. “One Season, My Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions” describes the pleasure of preparing a spicy Portuguese dish:

To be bright red is to want things to happen.
I know this and make Piri Piri, to be held
carefully, to be used later.
The nuances of honey and bitter, roll
about my tongue as I add the sauce to
our lives.

The poem’s title, like quite a few other titles in this collection, is a line written by a fellow poet—in this case, Juan Luis Guzmán—during the month-long exchange that produced Quarantine Highway. This is a book that shows how poetry matters during a time of crisis, how we can keep writing and remember to breathe through a shared sense of culture and community.

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