A review by poetloz
Night Is a Sharkskin Drum by Haunani-Kay Trask

4.0

I want to give this book a higher score. I want to love this book. But I can't. A lot of the pain that pours from the ink in each word is directly caused by my racial background. I am Hawaiian at Heart, which means that while I love the culture and live it (it's kind of required when you're married to a Native Hawaiian), I am neither Hawaiian nor was I born in Hawaii, so I am always an outsider, a tourist. My presence, in a lot of ways, is exactly what Trask responds to in many of these poems. They are filled with anger and sorrow and beauty. The tendency here is to make some simile about nature, but that would make the sentiment in the book sound primitive when it's a very, very modern one.