Review by Booklist Review
Poet and journalist Griswold won a Pulitzer Prize for Amity and Prosperity (2018) and received praise for I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan (2014), her translations of Afghani folk poems in a form rarely heard outside gatherings of women. In her new poems, Griswold takes fresh approaches to the themes that occupy her: political strife, human movement, borders, and the violence they impose. Key locales feature in the poems, such as Lampedusa, an island in the Mediterranean where hundreds of thousands of migrants ( giddy with surviving war elsewhere ) have landed en route to Europe, and Sabaudia, a coastal town in Italy now inhabited by Gypsies and Africans. Griswold's concise yet powerful poems revel in deceptively pleasing consonance ( A train's gaunt whistle haunts the shore ) and deliver unexpectedly abrupt conclusions centered on, for example, a portentous star or the seemingly overnight shifts in the balance of power that can wreck a nation-state: We wake / to the snap of a black flag over the door. An intelligent, occasionally difficult, poetic confrontation with a startling global present.--Diego Báez Copyright 2020 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer-winning journalist Griswold (Amity and Prosperity) examines the relationship between toxic masculinity, violence, and the creation of public narrative in her incisive poetry debut. Griswold suggests that the conventions of storytelling incite and erase violence against historically marginalized people: "Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ into a village,/ is not a metaphor/ but prelude to a massacre," she warns. She highlights the way language distances viewers from the escalating violence that floods the news, suggesting various power structures inform which stories are told, and which elicit sympathy: "The Fox News guy slipping his phone number/ over the anchor's desk,/ below the camera's eye;/ the radio host calling her a failure for/ becoming a mother." Griswold presents the news as inextricable from traditional beliefs about gender and power. Yet the speaker of these poems, "eager to share any awful story," frequently calls attention to the variability of beliefs about storytelling, and it is in this instability that she discovers agency, hope, and the possibility of redemption. She writes, as though describing the movement of the poems themselves: "She was warden of an angry garden,/ guarding against what hoped to grow." This well-timed exploration of violence and language is an exciting introduction to Griswold's work. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist perhaps best known for The Tenth Parallel, Griswold is also an accomplished poet. Her first collection, Wideawake Field, examined our shattered world, and she subsequently won a PEN translation award for I Am the Beggar of the World, which compiled Afghan women's folk poems. Here she retains that engaged sensibility as she writes poems so emotionally charged they seem on the verge of spilling over. Often, her poems occupy spaces in refugee camps or at border crossings--"What can we offer the child/ at the border: a river of shoes,/ her coat stitched with coins,/ her father killed for his teeth"--and many bear witness to destruction, whether though battle or ignorance. There is also concern for the planet's degradation: "Rats/ in the wheel wells, always rats and sickness, …and skies/ now empty of starlings, wheel themselves." But Griswold also seems to be in search of a self who may be searching for a self: "I is a lion/ who snarls/ at the lion/ in the water/ who snarls." And there is humor: "Exodus is a traffic jam/ and traffic jams are dangerous." VERDICT Palpable and provocative poems that can be appreciated by broad audience.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI
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