Dear Outsiders

With the exception of a handful of lineated lyrics, prose poems dominate Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s third book, Dear Outsiders, and capture moments in the relationship between two siblings who inhabit an anonymous coastal town, with paragraph-like stanzas functioning as postcards or polaroid snapshots.  “Making More of Ourselves” begins:

We cut the woods like a deck of cards. We make straight lines and don’t leave room open for bears to seep into. One lane roads no one can pass. We let owls crease at the corners, living gargoyles. We count

The siblings, who are neither gendered nor named, share experiences that Sadre-Orafai suffuses with evocative imagery: they tug on the circumference of a giant, particolored parachute in gym class (“a jelly suffocating an island”); treasure a carnival prize (“a red cellophane fish—his body like antique onionskin”); and race each other up lighthouse stairs, gasping for air (“Our lungs are open clams”). The poet’s use of the first-person plural conjoins the siblings’ experiences, while setting them apart from the vacationing tourists (called “hotel people” by locals). But the siblings also distance themselves from other townspeople (they decry the public pool: “Where is the salt, the smell, the slime, the sea stars immobile and magnified”). The effect is an alluring haze, enchanting but precarious, and one must squint to decipher the hints that all is not well with the speakers: “A grief bleating at our shores. / A landscape breaking.”

Midway through the book we learn that the siblings’ parents have drowned:

Double red flags whip on a different beach. Across the bridge. Water is used against our parents’ bodies. We aren’t there.

This cruel irony undercuts the lulling rhythm of Sadre-Orafai’s poems, and re-reading the book with this knowledge alters the experience, deepening it, and casting the beach scenes and oceanic imagery in new and haunting light, as in the poem “Throw Ring”:

Orange is a vest for hunting, the ring for saving at sea. Our mother’s hands are gone from where they held applause. Her orange lips bringing a note in her throat. [...] Her mouth—a warning that she would be found if she wanted to be saved.