Review by New York Times Review
DEAR DELINQUENT, by Ann Townsend. (Sarabande, paper, $15.95.) With elegant language and turbulent feeling, this collection tracks the course of desire. "The mind knows when to stand back," Townsend writes. "Part of me / was not for order, but chaos." LIMA :: LIMÓN, by Natalie Scenters-Zapico. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) This book, by a poet from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, fixates on liminal zones: national borders, gender roles, the overlap between love and possession. "Isn't that what women do," one poem challenges, "laugh at jokes at their own expense?" HYBRIDA: POEMS, by Tina Chang. (Norton, $26.95.) Drawing on fairy tales, mixed-media visual art and other hybrid forms, Chang evokes the bottomless love and terror of motherhood as she describes raising her mixed-race son: "I know the world will find him / and tell him the history of his skin." SIGHTSEER IN THIS KILLING CITY, by Eugene Gloria. (Penguin Poets, paper, $18.) Jazzy, surreal, neon-lit, Gloria's new poems describe a culture of violence in the Philippines and especially America. The book ends on the image of a sign at a mall: "Karate, Guns & Tanning." AN INFUSION OF VIOLETS, by Nancy Naomi Carlson. (Seagull, paper, $19.) Carlson, who also works as a translator and editor, uses controlled lines and a lyrical voice to plumb the self, often with biblical overtones.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 23, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The title of Chang's third collection signals a fusion of disparate elements, a hybrid that's been seemingly feminized. This mélange appears across an impressive array of forms: prose poems, ghazals, responses to artworks (by Alexandria Smith and Kara Walker, for example), the several-page "Bitch" and "Creation Myth," as well as verse that explores Chang's personal history. Primarily, though, this is a book about the speaker's son: her love for him, and how she and he negotiate his blackness in the world. In the opening poem, "He, Pronoun," she writes: "I have a right to fear for him,// though I have no right to claim his color./ His blackness is his to own and what will// my mouth say of that sweetness." The poem closes on the image of her son in her lap, a quotidian moment, but they "watch the door." With more urgency than a news article could achieve, Chang conveys the fear and rage at the reality that the color of her son's skin will mean she is unable to keep him safe. The title poem, subtitled "a zuihitsu," is a collage of questions and observations about identity, which at its end suggests hope for the future: "Wilderness/ of the mind. But it's changing." (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
As its title poem suggests, this new collection from Brooklyn poet laureate Chang (Of Gods and Strangers) is itself a hybrid consisting of variations of haiku, ekphrastic poems, free verse, list poems, sonnets, ghazels, prose poems, and terza rima. Here, Chang draws from her own experiences, stories from the Bible, fairy tales, and contemporary news accounts, as well as from other poets. The poem "276," for example, refers both to -Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "The Windhover" and several reports about the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls. In many of these pieces, Chang worries about the safety of her son and especially his future as he grows to manhood. She also muses on African American youth such as Michael Brown, who are unfairly treated by law enforcement, with the implied message that her son, too, could be harmed. Although some poems seem too politicized, it helps that Chang writes with a wonderful sense of metaphor, as in "my son senses what is happening/ on the street, his heart fiercely tethered/ to mine" or "hair rushing to the waist like ink." VERDICT A mysterious I-narrator speaks, whispers, and sometimes hisses these intense, urgent poems, which ultimately form a lament. For academic holdings and public collections that include a political or own voices element.-C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
