Emotional but rarely subtle poetry.
These verses explore issues of social justice and America’s legacy of slavery, together with relationships and spirituality.
Williams’ debut collection of 50 poems starts off with “People Wonder Why My Eyes Red:” (nearly all of the titles end in a colon). This statement about the speaker locates him in personal history: “My eyes are red because of my dad; he is not dead. / His trait passes down the family tree.” The redness here has to do with pain and bodily suffering, agony that can only be kept at bay with alcohol. In a later poem—“Red Eyes Tell My Struggle:”—the quality of redness now signifies not pain but rage, a consequence of the speaker’s “addiction for freedom.” This hints at a greater historical context for torment, although this insight gains the speaker little. Again alcohol comes into play, for which the poet pays a price, in this well-phrased line: “I drown my fire while drowning my cheer.” Many other pieces in the volume weave back and forth in this way between history, biography, and the toxicity of racism. This can become polemical, as in “Police State:” (“We feel the hand of the police state. / In parting freedom, we contemplate our fate. / As their system of laws turns protectors into the terrorist. / They lie, steal and imprison to maintain self-interest”). Typical of most works in the collection, this one reveals obvious alignments with slam poetry, which has roots in the oral tradition and tends to emphasize attitude, rhyme and slant rhyme (state/fate; terrorist/self-interest), repetition, and political engagement. The danger with polemics is that it can overtake poetic qualities like subtlety, imagery, and unexpected connections, allowing righteous emotion to substitute for a more thoughtful approach. Is it the system of laws itself, for example, or systemic racism that makes bad cops? Such lines read more like an op-ed piece than a poem. Sometimes Williams offers a fresh and intriguing line, as in describing an ambiguous revelation: “Plumes of smoke billowed out a prediction of zero.” For the most part, though, the collection has a heartfelt but amateurish quality. Williams too often makes word choices to fill out a rhyme: “I am a hero to some, to some others no identity, isolated and satanic,” he writes. What’s “satanic” about being isolated? Nothing, but the word provides a slant rhyme with “rabbit” in the next line. Some lines don’t make much sense at all, like “The planes were like horses that fly like vultures.” But horses don’t fly like vultures; they don’t fly at all. The love poems tend toward the saccharine: “You and me; me and you; our hearts blend too.” And one poem is disastrously misconceived, “A Poop Relationship:” (although the colon at last has some right to be there), which manages to combine the gross and the twee: “Poop is the waste from the digestive tract. / How does poop in a relationship interact?” asks the poet, concluding with “I offer you this tip: / Avoid a poop relationship.”
Emotional but rarely subtle poetry.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-2535-2
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.
Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.
In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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