Rummage

Oputa utilizes searing imagery and provocative language in her intimate and powerful debut: “Young shame is a contagion,/ chipped me into nigger-bitch.” The conflicted identities she describes are not a source of pride, but an adverse reaction to the trespasses of men that becomes as familiar and reflexive as muscle memory. Oputa links those scars of girlhood to the violence of self-discovery, as seen in “We Are Sitting Around My Shame,” where her speaker wonders, “What happens when you pull from the mouth its wisdom for restraint and leave behind a hole that wants to be filled with sound shrill and metallic”? Similarly, in “How Not To Itch,” Oputa views the physical body as an extension of memory. She writes, “Someone you don’t know is dead,/ and now here he is again,/ an inching, a chigger in your side,// a midnight-glazed sting.” This is an unapologetic collection that deflates romanticism about girlhood and exposes the ways in which innocence can act as a liability. (Sept.)