Made to Explode
Sandra Beasley. Norton, $26.95 (88p) ISBN 978-0-393-53160-2
The vibrant fourth collection from Beasley (Count the Waves) offers a litany of sensual pleasures and careful self-reckoning. Playful considerations of peaches, fried fish, grits, and other foods serve the poet to wide-ranging ends. Imagining the painter Marc Chagall transplanted from Belarus to Biloxi, the poet rhapsodizes about the silver fish native to the Gulf: “holy mullet would/ ring over his rooftops—// mullet, on violin—rooster/ and mullet, mullet and goat,” and muses, “how one// can scavenge the bottom/ and still rise, without apology,/ by the silvered dozen.” A series of ekphrastic prose poems at the book’s center describe national monuments, relying on their less than subtle ironies. On Roosevelt’s memorial: “This sculpted wall is supposed to speak of WPA, CCC, the alphabet agencies. But its Braille dots are oversized beyond any one fingertip. This is gibberish, a visitor says, feeling the spaces between.” Throughout the book, the poet contends with the pain of coming to terms with her Southern white heritage. A poem about whiteness, in which “my performative strip of self/ still trash[es] up the place,” ends with an ancestral invocation: “Virginia, my ghosts/ need gathering./ Come to the table/ and sit, goddamit. Sit.” Beasley uses her trademark humor and wit to explore the heavier parts of personal and national identity in this energetic and varied outing. (Feb.)
Details
Reviewed on: 01/14/2021
Genre: Poetry
Paperback - 112 pages - 978-1-324-03600-5