NewPages Blog

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.

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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.

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Guest Post by M. A. Dubbs.

As I’ve turned more to e-books and my Kindle through this COVID-19 winter, I have fallen in love with some beautiful indie poetry. 207th Bone is one of these books and showcases translated prose from China. Written by Zhou Li, a Chinese doctor and caretaker of one hundred tortoises, it explores themes of slice of life China, sensuality, depression, and the stress of practicing medicine.

The book starts with an introduction from Xi Nan who discusses the difficult translation process from Chinese to English. Next is an interview from Li as he explores his worldview of nihilism and how this has influenced his writing. The poems are untitled and separated by time periods of Li’s life. The tone shifts from bleak and visceral (“Go down the throat / Into my stomach / Don’t know which season is growing / In my body”) to political (“’China Dream’ is written / Under the billboard / A beggar is sleeping on the ground / I dare not toss a coin to him / I’m afraid the sound / would interrupt / His dream”).

207th Bone is a great read for anyone looking for modern Chinese poetry which is largely underrepresented in current literature.

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207th Bone by Zhou Li. Simi Press, August 2020.

Reviewer bio: M. A. Dubbs is an award winning LBTQ Mexican-American poet from Indiana.

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Guest Post by Padmaja Reddy.

The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak debut poetry collection by Grace Lau, is an intensive attempt in discovering concealed elements of immigrant inheritances, queer yearnings, and multi-generational mysteries.

These poems valiantly exhibit the lonely corners and abandoned experiences of great pain. Readers explore the visible and invisible identities of immigrant life in poems like “Ginseng, winter melon, lotus root,” “My grandmother’s wallpaper,” “My grief is winter,” “Family Vacation,” “Going Home.”

Influences of church, technology, western culture, and ancestral customs among second-generation lives are revealed artfully in her poetry. A granddaughter wonders about her grandmother’s age as she believes the latter stole a few years to work early to feed her family in “The Lies That Bend.” “She said loneliness is better; than sin” summarizes how the Asian parents feel about unconventional/queer lives.

The emotional intensity of Lau’s work is shown in these compelling lines:

“She swung a sword as a man,
Wept as woman
Sang as both”

“How do you find yourself
When you don’t know your motherland”

“He has been mourning
The future
For the last twenty years”

“Loss that lives in a new-silence snow.”

I loved reading this very remarkable poetry collection.

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The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak by Grace Lau. Guernica Editions, May 2021.

Reviewer bio: Padmaja Reddy, originally from India, lives in Connecticut. She received an MA in English Literature from SK University. Former journalist and she published poetry and book reviews in various publications like Yale Review of Books, NewPages.

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