Hala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as someHala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as some more personal struggles she has had with womanhood, most specifically her journey with motherhood. I foundt that her poems about diaspora and the women in previous generations of her family were the most touching and powerful, while the ones that strayed away from Palestine and being the child of refugees were less powerful to me. Overall, this was an excellent poetry collection and used some unique methods--some that I really loved (the “choose your own adventure” style poems), and somes that I didn’t love as much (the medical records ones).
Here are some excerpts from my favorites:
From “They Both Die on Mondays in April”: “… I am never paying attention. I cried because Fatima was already half-gone, because Nadia would later say I was the happiest bride she’d ever seen, because I didn’t recognize the photographs, because I left the wrong country, but hasn’t everything already happened somewhere? Aren’t we all waiting like unrung bells, and hadn’t Fatima already died that night, and Nadia too, and the city, and the house, and in that hotel bed, in that flesh that is their flesh, in that bone that is their bone, their every season, wasn’t I only remembering?”
From “Half-Life in Exile”: “... Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwauke, It’s done nothing for Palestine. … The plants are called fire-followers, but sometimes they grow after the rains. At night, I am a zombie feeding on the comments. Is it compulsive to watch videos? Is it compulsive to memorize names? Rafif and Amir and Mahmoud. Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias: I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles. A plant waits for fire to grow. A child waits for a siren. It must be a child. Never a man. Never a man without a child. There is nothing more terrible than waiting for the terrible. I promise. Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.”
From “Brute”: “... I want to fight for a country even if that country didn’t want me even if when my mother bought a patch of land & tried to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me because my name is my father’s name because he was born in Palestine and so impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t have me you know the way our mothers did” ...more
This is a grief-stricken, painfully loving, violently obsessive collection that feels like a frantic stream of consciousness, with each poem twining tThis is a grief-stricken, painfully loving, violently obsessive collection that feels like a frantic stream of consciousness, with each poem twining together to create a story in feelings. It’s a bit fragmented at times, lending to the air of desperation. It doesn’t feel as though Siken is composing these words as much as they are flowing out of him uncontrollably and it is a matter of life and death that he gets all the words down. These poems are the grief of a mourning man put into words. They are his shame, his fears, his longing, his loneliness. There is a violence associated with this love because of the circumstances of it and the self-hating that can come with being queer in a time/place that it is not accepted that reminds me quite a bit of the violent thoughts in These Violent Delights, which I found to be especially prominent in “Wishbone” and “Driving, Not Washing”. There is so much content in these poems, but it all whittles down to Siken’s raw emotions, which overpower the narrative, as his cyclical writing forces us to go round and round with him on this repetitive ride that he is stuck in.
Louise Glück writes an incredible forward for this collection and I can’t say it better than her when she said: “That Silken turns life into art seems, in these poems, psychological imperative rather than literary ploy: the poems substitute the repeating cycles of ritual for linear progressive time—in Crush, the bullet enters the body and then returns to the gun. . . the poems are driven by what they deny; their ferocity attests to the depth of their terror, their resourcefulness to the intractability of the enemy's presence."
Below, I’ve copied down some excerpts and full poems that I really love. My favorite poem, and possibly my new favorite poem(?) was ”Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”; my favorite parts are excerpted here, because boy, is it a bit long.
favorites:
[excerpts from] “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” Every Morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out You will be alone always and then you will die. So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than desperation. . . . I can already tell you think I’m the dragon, that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon, I'm not the princess either. Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later. . . . Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! What more do you want? I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re really there. Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live? Let me do it right for once, for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven. . . . You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. . . . Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards. Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle reconstructed. Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it. . . . You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud. Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you. . . . Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it Jerusalem. We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought, so do it over, give me another version, . . . Forget the dragon, leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness. Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into from, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly. I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn’t work, these erasures, these constant refolding of the pleats. . . .
[excerpt from] “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves” 1 The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway.
You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn’t do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Driving, Not Wishing” It starts with bloodshed, always bloodshed, always the same running from something larger than yourself story, shoving money into the jaws of a suitcase, cutting your hair with a steak knife at a rest stop, and you’re off, you’re on the run, a fugitive driving away from something shameful and half remembered. They’re hurling their bodies down the freeway to the smell of gasoline, which is the sound of a voice saying I told you so. Yes, you did dear. Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from the kingdom to kingdom through the wilderness, where you learn things, where you’re left to your own devices. Henry’s driving, and Theodore’s bleeding shotgun into the upholstery. It’s a road movie, a double-feature, two boys striking out across America, while desire, like a monster, crawls up out of the lake with all of us watching, with all of us wondering if these two boys will find a way to figure it out. Here is the black box, the shut eye, the bullet pearling in his living skin. This boy, half-destroyed, screaming Drive into that tree, drive off the embankment. Henry, make something happen. But angels are pouring out of the farmland, angels are swarming over the grassland, Angels rising from their little dens, arms swinging, wings aflutter, dropping their white-hot bombs of love. We are not dirty, he keeps saying. We are not dirty. . . They want you to love the whole damn world but you won’t, you want it all narrowed down to one fleshy man in the bath, who knows what to do with his body, with his hands. It should follow, you know this, like the panels of a comic strip, we should be belted in, but you still can’t get beyond your skin, and they’re trying to drive you into the ground, to see if anything walks away.
[excerpt from] “You Are Jeff” 22 You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terri- ble, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.
[excerpts from] “Snow and Dirty Rain” . . . … My dragonfly, my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing for blood, but we are the crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me tight, it’s getting cold. We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and a gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it… . . . … I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? … . . . … I would like to meet you all in Heaven. But there’s a litany of dreams that happens somewhere in the middle… . . . … Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one. We have been very brave, we have wanted to know the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes. . . . The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. . . . … I made this place for you. A place for you to love me. . . . … We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am leaving you clues, I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.
This is some of the first poetry I’ve sat down and read in my life and now I’m mourning the time lost with years of my life filled with a weird aversiThis is some of the first poetry I’ve sat down and read in my life and now I’m mourning the time lost with years of my life filled with a weird aversion to poetry because this is one of the best things I have ever read. Harjo has such an incredible way of using words to convey such strong emotions. I picked this up on a whim today and sat, reading it aloud to myself, until I finished it. There were multiple times where I had to stop because I was so amazed that I couldn’t find the words to keep reading for a moment. The introduction on Harjo’s connection to horses was such a beautiful way to start this collection as well.
I’m not too well-versed (ha ha) in writing reviews for poetry yet, so I’ll let the collection speak for itself through some of my favorites; maybe after poetry summer I’ll be able to convey my awe with proper words.
Vision The rainbow touched down “somewhere in the Rio Grande,” we said. And saw the light of it from your mother’s house in Isleta. How it curved down between earth and the deepest sky to give us horses of color horses that were within us all of this time but we didn’t see them because we wait for the easiest vision to save us. In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky. I heard the thunder of their beating hearts. Their lungs hit air and sang. All the colors of horses formed the rainbow, and formed us watching them.
She Remembers The Future “We are closer than blood,” Noni Daylight tells her. “It isn’t Oklahoma or the tribal blood but something more that we speak.”
(The otherself knows and whispers to herself.)
The air could choke, could Kill, the way it tempts Noni to violence, this morning. But she needs the feel of danger, for life.
She feels the sky tethered to the changing earth, and her skin responds, like a woman to her lover. It could be days, it could be years, White Sands or Tuscon. She asks, “Should I dream you afraid so that you are forced to save yourself?”
Or should you ride colored horses into the cutting edge of the sky to know
that we’re alive we are alive.”
II. Two Horses
I thought the sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo Mountains was enough, and that wild musky scents on my body after long nights of dreaming could unfold me to myself. I thought my dance alone through worlds of odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew would sustain me. I mean I did learn to move after all. and how to recognize voices other than the most familiar. But you must have grown out of a thousand years dreaming just like I could never imagine you. You must have Broke open from another sky to here, because now I see you as a part of the millions of other universes that I thought could never occur in this breathing. And I know you as myself, traveling. In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars and other circling planet motion. And then your fingers, the sweet smell of hair, and your soft, tight belly. My heart is taken by you and these mornings since I am a horse running towards a cracked sky where there are countless dawns breaking simultaneously. There are two moons on the horizon and for you I have broken loose.
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