The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins

In this exciting compendium, Bossiere and Trabold collect essays on identity by writers from marginalized communities. The editors define the lyric essay as a “form-between-forms” that forgoes prose conventions “in favor of embracing more liminal styles,” and the deeply personal contributions showcase the variety the form has to offer. In “Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan contemplates her multiracial family and likens the U.S. occupation of Iraq to the 2014 police violence against protestors in Ferguson, Mo., by recounting CNN clips she’s caught on airport TVs. Many of the contributions embrace experimental formats, such as Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s “World Maps,” in which text boxes positioned at drastic angles containing poem-like fragments reflect on Bertram’s burgeoning awareness as a child that she was biracial and lesbian. Danielle Geller’s “Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo–English Dictionary” is similarly adventurous, poignantly considering intergenerational trauma through autobiographical footnotes to a list of English translations of Navajo words. The inventive formats dazzle, finding novel ways to drive home each piece’s message and testifying to the rewards found when writers are willing to break the rules. These selections exemplify the profound possibilities inherent in the lyric essay. (Mar.)