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jacques_le_biem's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
ifpoetshadmerch's review against another edition
4.0
One of my poetry pet peeves is when a collection is dominated by a single mood or emotion. In poetry that deals with race, this is usually a melodramatic melancholia or an onslaught of rage. Rhodes, however, did an excellent job of varying the tone of her poems, sometimes lamenting the inherited and repercussive effects of colonialism, sometimes striking back with a biting or blunt lyric, sometimes delicate and sometimes fierce. In addition, there were also poems that felt victorious and unstoppable, despite the ghosts of the past. As a whole, the collection really lived up to its title: packed full of history that resonates into the now, a haunting of loss and culture that still has an impact on the present, eerie and proud.
My favorite of the collection was all your braids like a compass will bring us home. The poem describes how hairstyles of black slaves became a source of coded communication, in which the weaving of the braids represented a route to freedom, capable of depicting various dangers or save havens along the way. Rhodes writes, "your hair, daughter, black & ferocious,/ your hair, cunning & defiant,/ your hair, beautiful, whispers in tressy tongues" and "hold still, child, let me weave a song through, & bring the shelter of gods to your feet." I liked this poem for several reasons. Primarily, it told a story that I wasn't familiar with-- this tale of defiance, of escape maps woven through hair. Secondly, despite being one of the more narrative-esque poems in the collection with stanzas numbered like chapters or a how-to guide, Rhodes's lyricism and attention to Latin American geography still shines through. Thirdly, it takes the notion of the historically sexualized slave body and turns it completely on its head, giving this quiet and brave power to the flesh in a subtle and unapologetic way.
While at times the language and themes of the poems grew a little repetitive, overall this was a solid collection of poems that feels like a thousand years of ancestry simmered into Rhodes's perspective.
My favorite of the collection was all your braids like a compass will bring us home. The poem describes how hairstyles of black slaves became a source of coded communication, in which the weaving of the braids represented a route to freedom, capable of depicting various dangers or save havens along the way. Rhodes writes, "your hair, daughter, black & ferocious,/ your hair, cunning & defiant,/ your hair, beautiful, whispers in tressy tongues" and "hold still, child, let me weave a song through, & bring the shelter of gods to your feet." I liked this poem for several reasons. Primarily, it told a story that I wasn't familiar with-- this tale of defiance, of escape maps woven through hair. Secondly, despite being one of the more narrative-esque poems in the collection with stanzas numbered like chapters or a how-to guide, Rhodes's lyricism and attention to Latin American geography still shines through. Thirdly, it takes the notion of the historically sexualized slave body and turns it completely on its head, giving this quiet and brave power to the flesh in a subtle and unapologetic way.
While at times the language and themes of the poems grew a little repetitive, overall this was a solid collection of poems that feels like a thousand years of ancestry simmered into Rhodes's perspective.
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