GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA

The confines of Shanta Lee Gander’s debut, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA, aren’t those of tenements but of a resistant memory. This collection reads like a detective story as it conjures up lost relatives like ghosts and casts a time-travel spell upon the speaker so that she can enter the past: “How far can you go back? they said, Far, / she said, how far? they said, So far, she said, // It becomes a chant, she said, / I know all the names of my mothers.” But when she goes back, she finds memories that have hardened into disparate kernels. The speaker mulls over some recurring images and objects―a tan scarf turned into a halter top, the music of TLC and R. Kelly, a print of Gustav Klimt’s painting The Kiss, as examples―but there are gaps in between, things forgotten. She has to read her memories like a code:

280 Collins Street, in Mama’s lap, in
wherever all things gone missing be―
it wasn’t about any of these places, but
how well you be walking backwards counting
all the things between wake, fugue, and
woke, how well you be multilingual
in signs, fluent in breaking silences,

Her memory becomes a kind of language, the learning of which is an obsession, as are occult forms of communication like palmistry and tarot readings. Gander switches between African American vernacular English and Standard English while also employing numerous forms—Q&As, bulleted outlines, even a sequence of shadow-bordered “index” cards—experimenting with various ways of organizing and ordering language to see what might provide a more coherent past.

The process is not without its struggles—narrative obfuscation frustrates reader and poet alike—but as Gander sequences and resequences her recollections, returning to scenes from different angles, the picture fills in, and we are reminded that the past is always a present making of the self: “We be the alchemists, the meaning / of magician, fashioning ourselves from the wreckage of memory.”