As She Appears by Shelley Wong, and: Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe, and: Ask the Brindled by No'u Revilla, and: Distant transit by Maja Haderlap

Abstract

Reviewed by: As She Appears by Shelley Wong, and: Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe, and: Ask the Brindled by No'u Revilla, and: Distant transit by Maja Haderlap Debbra Palmer (bio) Shelley Wong. As She Appears. YesYes Books. As She Appears is Shelley Wong's debut full-length poetry collection and the winner of the 2019 YesYes Books Pamet River Prize. It opens in a season of emergence: "Spring insists we can build the world / around us again." Wong, a queer and fourth-generation Chinese American, writes with a kaleidoscopic gaze as described in her poem about the shape of an eyelid. Wong's poems observe art and fashion as well as nature, as in her depiction of supermodels: girls who "look like night trees." The awareness of threats to queer culture and women of color, and another kind of threat—loneliness after love—seem to motivate much of Wong's writing. A resident of San Francisco, where she is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Wong says that through her writing she aims to affirm other people like her, who have "felt unseen and unheard in literary and artistic spaces." In a lyrical response to a therapist asking if she'd be happier if she were straight, Wong writes, "As a girl I never / saw a woman / who looked like me. / I had to invent her. / I am inventing her." Refusing to sidestep the subjects of racism and homophobia, these poems return to the self with affirmation. An urgency resonates from subtle, yet deeply harmful, public estrangements to the horrors of the Orlando nightclub shooting. The book ends where it begins, with spring, and the poet's vision of returning to the sea, almost new. "Come out, come out, / my queens of color." There is no turning back. Ama Codjoe. Bluest Nude. Milkweed Editions. Ama Codjoe is an American poet who was raised in Youngstown, Ohio, with roots in Memphis and Accra. She is the author of Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. In Bluest Nude, Codjoe's second book, poems are composed with references to other Black women artists and their works, all comingling with Codjoe's consciousness. The collection begins with a quote by the conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady, which launches into Codjoe's poems that "look at the long unmirrored true selves." Codjoe also calls to Gwendolyn Brooks, Wanda Coleman, Mickalene Thomas, Deana Lawson, Betye Saar, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and others. The poet Elizabeth Bishop is brought to attention as well, for the young Bishop's reaction to images of African women's [End Page 180] breasts from the well-known poem, "In the Waiting Room." Through ekphrasis, Codjoe amplifies the physical and emotional quality of the poems by engaging with dance. This choreography appears in a sensual lyric, presents the body as both exposed and vulnerable, nurtured and sovereign: "When I rose, I left the print / of a woman behind." In seeing and sensing with the whole body, "I want / to be more like my eyes," Codjoe names grief, anger, resentment, and desire, and occasionally leaves blanks where she refuses to give over the power of language. The narrative in Codjoe's poems weaves American Black culture and history. Two vastly different poems in the collection, "Poem After Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" and "Burying Seeds," demonstrate Codjoe's range of language and power; one responds to the racist myth of happy Black servitude, while the other is a personal reflection dedicated to Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz. No'u Revilla. Ask the Brindled. Milkweed Editions. No'u Revilla is an 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator and a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. In her first book, Ask the Brindled, Revilla returns to her Hawaiian heritage and ancestors to explore the linkages between living in one's land and living in one's body. Revilla questions, "Must the world suffer more origin stories?" The answer is detectable between the lines, because where we come from matters in the fight for selfhood and sovereignty. And a connection to the sacred land reminds us that it must be...