UNTETHERED GROUNDS

In this poetry collection, Bioku probes the pressure points where disparate forces collide.

There is seemingly no topic the author doesn’t broach in this broad new collection of poems. The book is divided into sections (“Grounded in the Elements,” “Grounded in Society,” “Grounded in Self,” “Grounded in Humanity,”) that are further subdivided into clusters revolving around the concepts of fire or water, familial connections or city life, “body inhibitions,” or “economic restorations.” The elemental poems deal largely with the natural world, particularly as it grows increasingly blighted by pollution and climate change. The imagery of “Apocalypse” is reminiscent of the wildfires California has suffered in recent years: “The chimney is filled with smoke. / From the mountain side, we can see the desolated fire. / Startled goats, leopards, and sheep run away feeling petrified.” Not every poem is quite so dire; in “Mojave,” a trip to see the Joshua trees in winter leads to a moment of profound understanding: “We watched as the snow fell gracefully onto the broccoli-shaped florets. / Here in the hidden valley, everything becomes known.” Bioku evinces a fascination with the injection of alien material into preexisting systems, as in “Fluticasone Lungs,” an ode to the allergy-relieving nasal spray: “My organ seeks to float on inorganic compounds. / Air-filled alveoli, oxygen is needed. / Windpipes knocked down; cilia can’t filter this one out. / The walls of the trachea are quickly closing in on me.” In “The Agreement,” foreign investment is the interloper, wreaking havoc on developing economies: “Host countries are left to fend for themselves. / They lack the resources to grow and develop. / Forceful control of both people and land. / Many are left feeling exposed and exploited.” Throughout the work, Bioku asks, again and again, what these intrusions mean for the intruded-upon and the intruder.

The book is on the longer side for a poetry volume. The number and neatness of the poems—each has a fairly digestible concept or metaphor that Bioku pursues for about a dozen lines—give readers the sense that they were written quickly, and one wishes the poet had been willing to weed out the weaker ones. The more engaging offerings are specific in their language, especially those that find the speaker’s emotion mirrored in a natural world. “Whales create splashes by the harbor,” reads “Wingspan,” “But the Albatross birds are still suffering. / Plastic consumes their intestines; they struggle to feed their offspring. / There’s not enough zooplankton for this keystone species. / They live and breathe water; it’s all that they know.” Such lines, while sometimes endearingly clunky, work better than the wooden language in verses like “They say work hard and play harder, but I’m not fond of games. / Disposable income unanchored in the industrialized system” (“Grinds and Flows”). Part of this approach may be that Bioku thrills in the precision of scientific language while struggling to locate the same liveliness in humans and their relationships to each other. Even so, readers may be curious to see how her style develops over future collections.

A large and uneven collection of poems chronicling ill-fated encounters.