Latitude 

Natasha Rao’s debut, Latitude, is at once highly sensuous and peculiarly unassuming. Composed of lyrical and narrative poems that wrestle with the poet’s estrangement from her family (and childhood past) and explore her developing identity, the collection is in some ways a fairly straightforward Bildungsroman in verse. But Rao executes the conventions of the genre with aplomb, through detailed sketches of the material world and acute portrayals of inner turmoil: “What a relief, at last, to admit I am in love with turbulence.” 

Rao’s speaker sits at the nexus between her South Asian heritage and contemporary American culture. Vegetarianism and the “ultimate nonviolence” of Jainism are juxtaposed against indulgences in seafood and meat, alcohol, and sex, which all point to an emerging rebellious spirit. Guilt follows. Sometimes it’s overt, as in “Abecedarian on Shame,” in which “A mushroom quietly throbs with poison. I / bloat full of lies.” Sometimes it’s implied in narrative moments: the speaker frequently gazing into mirrors, for instance, in both literal and figurative acts of self-reflection. Most disarming of all, however, are the startlingly frank admissions: “I am only kind to my father / in poems he will never read.” This is quite a statement from a poet who writes elsewhere, “Summer we rickshawed in silks, / milk shimmering in silver tins. / White garlands adorned gods on / plinths and mortals fragrant in / the kitchen.” This much more sensuous approach is deployed to invoke both moments from the past and more immediate pleasures: ripening tomatoes, Coney Island, an orgasm. Rao pits nostalgia and desire as nodes of past and present, the distance between which the speaker measures with meditative detachment as she observes both worldly pleasures and her own emotional vicissitudes: “This / is how we live, year after year, / auspicious and barefoot.”