FORK AND PAGE | Book Reviews

American Toxicity: Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

How does one wade in the water, when the water is toxic? The current United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, approaches this question in a variety of thought-provoking ways in her profound fourth collection, Wade in the Water. The water Smith considers is literal, political, historical, and metaphorical: the water we drink, the culture we are steeped in, the history we carry with us, and the spirituality imbued in our everyday lives. With a deeply critical mind, Smith pr

Diagram of a Tongue: Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong

Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong is unlike any book of poetry I have ever encountered. It’s no wonder Joy Harjo selected it as the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award. An amalgam of poetry and visual art, of family history and feminism, of diagrams and mixed media, in it Monica Ong not only dissolves the boundary between poetry and art, but also the boundary between the heart and the mind. Ong uses her heart to search through her family’s history for clues of what it has

A Woman’s Acreage: Blackacre by Monica Youn

Poetry often benefits from a poet’s previous career or occupation. Some of my favorite collections were written by doctors and nurses because those writers understood the body on another level entirely, and brought that knowledge to their work. Monica Youn did not work in the medical field, but was rather a lawyer, yet still she uses this experience to reimagine the body as a possession, one that can be stolen from us. In a blog post for the Poetry Foundation, Youn explains t

Feast of Tongues: Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair

Cannibal opens with the words, “Have I forgotten it— / wild conch-shell dialect, / black apostrophe curled / tight on my tongue?” and the answer is a resounding— no, Sinclair is in full possession of all the muscle memory of her tongue. She uses this powerful muscle to create a lavish feast of language that crosses the ocean from her native Jamaica to Virginia and back again in one the most impressive debut collections I have ever read. I began following Sinclair’s work after

Claiming the Female Body: Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez

Erika L. Sánchez’s courageous debut collection Lessons on Expulsion begins with a rite of passage, a poem titled “Quincerañera,” which is one of Sánchez’s first lessons in expulsion, an expulsion from the relative safety of childhood. The speaker acknowledges this ceremony of becoming a woman by marking the body, first with a navel piercing, itself symbolic of the act of the child rebirthing the self as woman. The next act of claiming comes in the form of a tattoo, “A fat man

The Glass Knife: A Review of Cynthia Cruz’s How the End Begins

Like Cynthia Cruz, I too am in love with all things broken. Obsessed with endings before beginnings have even begun. When my mother came home from a trip to Boston with Cynthia Cruz’s How the End Begins in her suitcase it felt like kismet. I felt an immediate attraction to the work as if I had just met a friend. I was unfamiliar with Cruz, my mother had gone into the Grolier Poetry Book Shop and told the salesperson about her poet daughter and they recommended this book. Book

On the Threshold of Music: Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Music prevails throughout Ocean Vuong’s 2016 debut poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds published by Copper Canyon Press. The opening poem “Threshold” is rooted in the body/voice connection. The poet, presumably as a child, kneels in order to watch his father shower through a keyhole in the bathroom door, the father is singing, the sound flowing through him like the water raining down on him. Vuong brings us inside this intimate moment with absolute song, “His voice—