MUSEUM POETICA: ANVIL AND ROSE

TRAVESTY GENERATOR by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram. Noemi Press, 2020 ($18.00)

Bursts of poetry around social justice issues often produce schlock-fests. In Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), Lillian-Yvonne Bertram largely avoids that tendency by resorting to Oulipian devices. Murder of black men at the hands of police gets passed through the cutup method, such that the travesty of injustice becomes a literary travesty. Predictably, it’s hit and miss — that’s what the method’s about — but that mixed result puts it way above the ‘authentic,’ earnest lamentations and outcry of the mawkish, the hotheads, the culture cancellers, and the inchoate. It’s true that Bertram’s “’a’tc’a’tn’t”, “c’ta’tn’t”, “‘aebaeraeathe’”, “‘aerbaeraeathe’”, is an obvious, even tritely opportunistic permutation of “I can’t breathe,” offering no improvement on the known except a wan postmodern gesture of radicalism. Yet there’s plenty of troubling excitement in these pages.  Bertram works best by repetition with variation, adding in key pieces of information that turn a puzzle into significance.

DMZ COLONY by Don Mee Choi. Wave Books, 2020 ($20.50)

Documentary photos, testimonials from Korean War orphans, line drawings, are testaments to an author’s shock and Rorschach, as she revisits the scene of half-century old political drama, through literal and metaphorical translation, mark this compelling and original book as an act of witness. Critical prose essays, rooted in Althusser and Deleuze and Guattari, such as “The Apparatus” and “Interpellation of Return,” complete the complex gesture of flight. “Return…black faced spoonbill…return” stands alongside “translation is an anti-neo-colonial mode” and “mirror words are meant to compel resistance, disobedience.” Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” makes a literally harrowing cameo. The experience of reading is bleak, though countered by Choi’s stubborn idealism. The sheer heterogeneity of this book keeps you off balance, guessing at the telos of this twice-told history, even as a real-life orphan declares, “All the corpses are burning.  Somehow my mom was headless.”

POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM by Natalie Díaz. Graywolf, 2020 ($16.00)

The self-serious, self-exalting, sentimental title is somewhat belied by a handful of trenchant, clear-eyed observations of the speaker’s brother and a bullet, in a permanent danger zone. More often, the poet succumbs to the now-familiar gestures of ethnic identity and facile hortatory evocations of an erstwhile postcolonial subject in flux between “my lover’s elbow” and the most quoted line of poor Lorca, straight from Good Reads, a writer perpetually abused by cliché-makers romanticizing him into a poetic Jim Morrison. “Maybe this is what Lorca meant when he said, verde que te quiero verde—.” She exalts her hypothetical suffering: “the yoke of myself/the beast of my country’s burdens,” and “my country’s plow.” Some poems feel as if written by a committee of MS-13 members. The most honest, if still misguided lines in the collection are “they think/brown people fuck better when we are sad.” If only it were delivered with stinging irony, but like almost everything else, it’s bitter soi-distant knowing self-pity, the kind that’s always dead earnest. This self-declared “brown” volume is ready-made for certain mid-list, prosperous presses, and the concomitant self-rewarding prizes of those “independents'' inevitably flowed, to the sound of “the quivering green music of animals.” A surfeit of self, yet no authentic self.

FANTASIA FOR THE MAN IN BLUE by Tommy Blount. Four Way Books, 2020 ($22.00) 

The cover sports a painting of a Fourth Reich skinhead, who looks as much like a Maori warrior. Not accidental, that. The title poem, “My God, Lick Him Clean,” begins with a blond man who commandeers a slave ship being cannibalized by its slaves. In parallel, a black man fellates a well-endowed blond boy, literally choking on ecstasy. Blount makes clear that “the speaker” is as much him as anybody. Fantasia offers the visceral shock absent in much contemporary poetry. Meanwhile, Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, and the usual suspects have tamed risk by “normalizing” this within its reward structure, portraying him as “gay and black,” telling us what he ‘really meant,’ and eliciting pieties about transgender, disenfranchised, etc., via insipid, inoffensive interviews and blurbs: “what we crave to soothe the pain.” It is “evocative” and creates “brutal and tender moments we can’t bear.” Cue the tremolo and piccolo. Meanwhile, back at the poem: “You didn’t resist/when he held your head down/your nose held against his pelvis/his head buried in your throat/an old salve.” If the wild Blount is set free from his golden cage, his first words to his captors might well be, “I’m not your Negro.” 

GUILLOTINE by Eduardo Corral. Graywolf, 2020 ($16.00)

The title says it all. This book slices, pitiless, not caring what impression it will make on the vox populi. I ♥ brown A$$ is only one phrase of the many words of self-examination. Gleeful? Regretful? He doesn’t say. Neither family relations, cultural roots, nor race are given a pass. “Outside Oaxaca, in a clinic, my mother said,/“I hate your Indian face.” Finding her wedding dress, the poet utters “As I lifted the lid, a stench corkscrewed/into my nostrils:/the lace had curdled like milk.” If this tome can be called political, it’s the kind of consciousness raising that produces an ulcer. The liberal use of Spanish passages, and the experimental impulse, co-exist alongside more conventional poems, further evidence of a non-dogmatic mind. One might call some of these blistering poems mordant compassion. I fell headfirst into a river/there’s a gun tucked in my left boot/twelve bullets,” followed by being held in detention in Phoenix, ends in the brief prayer “Stray tenderness/stay.” Whether it’s the poet praying for himself, or an account of some other anonymous soul being abused by the state, it always feels first-person singular in this taut volume. For once, Graywolf got it right.