Men Who Feed Pigeons

On their surface, the poems in Selima Hill’s Men Who Feed Pigeons appear quite plain: couplets in iambic pentameter, with simple sentence structures and diction. But this plainness belies sophisticated tonal complexity. Take “The Banker,” from the very first page:

Where the swimsuit digs into her skin,
the woman’s body glares an angry red
that shimmers in the sunshine like the wine
shimmering beside the burning banker. 

Using a thickly applied color motif―the red of the swimmer’s irritated skin, the sun, the wine, and the assumed flush of the banker’s face―alongside words like “glare” and “burn,” the poet makes us see the anger in these lines. But where does the anger come from? We can surmise that there is some antagonism between the two characters, but this is established by the poet’s use of literary devices, not by narrative. Anger is being worked into the poem and the effect is a tonal instability, which elsewhere Hill achieves through stylistic techniques like mismatched similes: “when he takes my hand I close my eyes / and tremble like a mass killer sobbing.” The abrupt reference to a “mass killer” is bizarre, a suddenly macabre element that confuses the mood of this otherwise poignant statement. Ambivalence also finds its way into some of the poet’s most frank observations: “Every time he hurts me I tell myself / he doesn’t understand, he’s like a child― / and sometimes that can help and sometimes not.” 

The speaker’s entire orientation to gendered relationships fluctuates. Sometimes she can transcend the pain they induce, as an empowered feminist (“What kind of a woman am I not to speak?”), while at others she seems beholden to more conventional norms, jealous of a man’s gaze at another woman or complaining that “women nag.” By refusing to settle on a single emotional register, and by negotiating cultural values from different generational perspectives, these seemingly simplistic poems remind us both of our own and of society’s messy, constantly shifting attitudes.