SUN DIAMONDS

A collection offers snapshots from a poet’s life, reflections on spirituality, and views on vulnerable women around the world.

“I almost cannot believe my eyes,” Anastasi writes of seeing an impoverished woman in Bangladesh, “bent/leaning / into the street / washing her hair in a puddle.” This volume of poetry revisits several striking moments like this one from her extensive travels in countries such as Afghanistan, Bolivia, Yemen, and many more. Here, the author focuses specifically on Bangladesh (the name of the first section of her collection), but stark figures, mostly women and children, from around the world drift through the pages: “The desert winds sweeping over Baghdad / Make her skin shudder.” The work’s later sections move into ruminations on injustice and the hope that comes from her spirituality, which she describes as Christianity with an interest in other world religions. “In your sorrow / in your anger / you dance / to the face of your oppressors,” Anastasi writes in the mournful “Stigma,” before sharing a vision of her “rainbow God dancing.” The latter portion of Anastasi’s collection, called “Love & Relationships,” uses the same sparse, soft prose to explore her past loves, figures who have come and gone from her life. “I wanted so achingly to love you / I wanted so achingly you to love me,” she writes in “To a Friend Lost Somewhere in the World.” Through each theme, the author moves efficiently. Her poems are compact, creating potent images in one or two lines, such as hungry children in Africa with “legs like bamboo reeds” or Jesus’ flesh being torn on the cross. Anastasi also shows quite a range in a short collection, proceeding effortlessly from sweeping subjects like racism and poverty to quiet, private moments from her own life: “I dare not move / for fear that / you will wake / and we will have to leave / this (sacred) place.”

A concise but powerful volume of poetry navigating an ambitious scope of subjects.