The poetry may not be especially striking, but the narrative arc and collective emotional force of these poems are impelling...
Free verse that follows its narrators from the despair of pain to the ecstasy of Christian praise.
In this voluminous debut, Angielic and Angie Me’Shelle trace a labyrinthine yet affecting path as the narrators suffer agony upon agony, only to discover within their struggles inner strength and a faith that eventually rings out in hymnlike praise. In Dantean fashion, the book’s four sections return in ascending spirals to the same themes but from a more self-possessed perspective each time. In the opening section, the Me’Shelles run the narrators through a catalog of pains: domestic violence, childbirth, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, rape, infidelity, divorce, addiction, discrimination and crime. For all the assorted horrors, the authors save the strongest testament for a victim of child sexual abuse. While neither prurient nor graphic, the treatment is direct and raw: “I was just five / when they first touched me / too young to understand,” opens one poem. The Me’Shelles remain unflinching in unspooling the futures of these young victims, too. In “Silent Screams,” they tell of a young girl, repeatedly abused, whose family refuses to believe her. Abandoned by those who should have protected her, she eventually commits suicide, all while the narrator rhetorically wonders, “Do any one (sic) hear her at all?” From these intimately visceral and bodily pains arise passions that are physical and sexual. The narrators are women who know what they want—“I know what I like / and I like what I see / I want a man in uniform / dressed up for me”—but the struggles they have endured have taught them to put prudence ahead of momentary pleasures. As one narrator states, in a twist on the Luther Ingram classic, “If loving you is wrong / I choose to be right.” Likewise, since they have so often been on the wrong side of the abuse of power, the narrators tend to express power in terms of overcoming or surviving, as titles such as “Breaking the chains,” “I didn’t give up” and “Somehow I made it” suggest. The moving testimony to the history of the African-American struggle, in “Brilliantly Black,” stands out as a particularly hopeful refiguring of what it means to be powerful.
The poetry may not be especially striking, but the narrative arc and collective emotional force of these poems are impelling and impressive.Pub Date: June 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1470152291
Page Count: 360
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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