A noteworthy collection with a compelling backstory of community building and personal empowerment.
An inspirational volume offers poetry published by Untold Stories, a collective of women of color residing in Michigan.
This collection of diverse voices—“Black, Latinx, Arab, Indigenous, and Asian”—predominantly features free verse written in the first person. Each of the three main sections is tied to a specific workshop held in 2019: “Mothering”; “Migration, Rootedness, and Belonging”; and “Survival & Vision.” A fourth section highlights selected poems from these earlier chapters translated into Spanish, thereby allowing bilingual readers to compare and enjoy both versions. (The volume’s introduction is rendered in English and Spanish as well.) Uncredited photographs of various workshop participants and settings appear throughout the text, with design and graphics by Miriam Cuevas Enciso. The book also presents brief profiles of all 26 contributors, including the five “founding sisters” of Untold Stories, debut editors Rios, Simmons, Quiroz, Ibarra-Frayre, and Reza. One of the most impressive poems is “Microchimerism” by Maria Thomas, which represents a conversation of sorts between a mother and son as they trade stories of amazing animal feats: “You’re in kindergarten now / and the factoids / are getting / more sophisticated / more bizarre / more flatulent / and gory.” Reflecting their unbreakable bond, the title refers to the phenomenon whereby fetal cells can remain in a mother’s body for long periods of time. Thomas continues with animal imagery in order to combine the enthusiasm of learning with the responsibility of educating children in matters of social justice. On a more harrowing note, the mother in Quiroz’s “Truth” tries to protect her 3-year-old daughter from an abusive partner: “Then he blew up / No talk back allowed / he said / He’d taken enough / living brown in world of white.” Moreover, the lack of punctuation effectively lends a breathless quality of immediacy and escalation to the text. In “Awareness,” Ibarra-Frayre considers the challenges of immigration and employs the image of boiling water—alternately dangerous, transformative, and comforting—to convey both suffering and strength: “And the boiling grief of my mother’s prayers / Creates an impenetrable vapor of / Protection.” Every workshop participant was invited to publish at least one piece. While the volume as a whole may strike some readers as occasionally uneven, this project underscores the notion that poetry belongs to everyone as a form of expression and connection.
A noteworthy collection with a compelling backstory of community building and personal empowerment.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-56637-5
Page Count: 68
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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