NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson.

At first, it is hard to get past the title as it is with all of Christopher Citro’s titles. They are so good in the way that they trip you up and shine back on you.

Take the title of If We Had A Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That The Sun. Lemon points to Citro’s name and its meaning, a citrus category of fruit. He also points to exuberance. The word sun points to son or to Citro as a son. It points to survival. This scene is also dismal, it is dark. If a lemon shines brightly as the sun, then this is a sunless place. Maybe a dark cedar forest. This title is desperate and makes me think of immigration or refugees who have nothing, no vitamin C.

Am I making too much of the title? Probably. It is hard to ignore its shiny reflection. I wonder where I am and wonder which side of the shadow I will go to next. I am tempted to list all his titles here, you would get lost in their stark imagery and artful sound. Teasers:  “Dear Diary Where Is Everybody” and “In Small Significant Ways We’re Horses.”

Continue reading “Citro’s Shining Reflection”

Guest Post by Karina Borowicz.

In tension there is energy, and the energy in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree is released in fistfuls, waves, gusts, and flames. It is an energy that bursts forth from confrontations: between wild and tame, individual and universal, being and oblivion, exuberance and despair. And with these collisions and collusions it becomes clear that the lines we draw, the walls we build, and the boundaries we dare not cross are, despite their seeming solidity, in truth quite tenuous. They are maintained by belief, and we are free to escape. The poet declares, “I don’t believe in walls. May walls / Cease this very moment to exist. / I’m boundless.”

These poems are voracious for boundlessness, an unhooking of the self from the anchor of obedience to norms that emphasize divisions. The voices in these poems speak with revolutionary fervor about such acts of disobedience. “I am composing an explosion,” the poet says in “Besieged,” a poem in which the vertigo of broken bonds is at first frightening, then thrilling.   Throughout the book, a blissful freedom and expansiveness is found in surrender to nature and the sensual world, in merging the self with the other, and in artistic expression. Overstepping boundaries, however, is not without cost. To expand, one must break. The thrill in these poems is also a kind of searing pain.

Co-translator Tracy K. Smith says she tried to capture the original’s “rhythmic and emotional insistence.” Sound play and patterning give these poems muscle and a heartbeat: “Weary, wary, watching you / Watch me. Your gale-force gaze / Wants to topple me. I give.” One can’t help but feel windblown after reading this book. It’s a force of nature.

My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Yi Lei, translated from the Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi. Graywolf Press, November 2020.

Reviewer bio: Karina Borowicz is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Rosetta, which won the Ex Ophidia Prize. She writes about the craft of poetry at karinaborowicz.com/blog/.

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Guest Post by Lannie Stabile.

A Black girl can be a dog, a rat, a gadget, a myth, a ghost, a mermaid, origami, or livestock. A Black girl can be a scavenger, a caged bird metaphor, a “perfect little alien,” or unwelcomed roots. A Black girl can be a black cloud, but she cannot be the white sky. A Black girl can be any imaginable thing, but she is not allowed to be a person. Not in the eyes of a white crowd, anyway. This is the trap, the endless, disparaging loop, that Khalisa Rae describes in her debut book of poetry Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat.

The collection is broken into three sections titled: “Fire,” “Wind and Water,” and “Earth and Spirit,” and it’s easy to see why this is an important designation. Rae writes, “You will be asked, where are you from? more than you are asked, how are you doing?” As if white people don’t know Black girls are elemental, powerful, and from the very core of this earth.

But, still, the expertly-crafted poems are mournful and simmering with unexpressed rage. They illustrate quiet resignation (“You’re left to break and mend, stitch your wounds to not spill the secrets, sober your sorrows and be back before Monday’s 8:00 a.m. exam.”), peaceful protest (“Sometimes, I go to white spaces, plant myself. I know my roots aren’t welcome there.”), and grave desperation (“We gamble with our obituaries like we don’t have a thousand other ways to die.”).

When white people feel entitled to every space, what is a Black girl to do? The advancement is made in excruciating inches, but it comes at the expense of her raw throat and heart.

Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat by Khalisa Rae. Red Hen Press, 2021.

Reviewer bio: Lannie Stabile (she/her) is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook, “Strange Furniture,” is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests.

Buy this book at our affiliate Bookshop.org.