English as a Second Language

Two titles, two dedications, two tables of contents: Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems is two books in one; which one you read depends on which cover you start with. Read front to back, Bolina’s book begins by ambling down straightforward narrative paths—then zigzagging at the earliest opportunity. Its title poem, opening this side of the book, is a South Asian immigrant narrative in which English is decentered and defamiliarized, not simply a second but a second-place language. Three Indian men, new to 1960s London, come upon “a line of English / eating dog,” “slathered with a drab yellow / chutney”—that is, hot dogs with mustard. Watching those Englishmen “offending / nature,” the three promptly order their own hot dogs, on their own terms: “We didn’t come here to become / like them. We came here to eat.” “Ancestral Poem,” addressed from father to child, condenses a familial journey to two lines: “And so we settled upon the shore / of a nasally Midwestern sea.” As for the westward movement outside the speaker’s window, that gets three lines: “I could see some moths mistake / the neon heat of a Blockbuster / Video sign to the west for home.”

Read back to front, Bolina’s book carries a different title: The Usual Entertainment. It, too, opens with hot dogs, ordered at an all-American ballpark “in the city of my heart, Illinois, where we lose / so much more than we win.” Bolina’s alternate title underscores his comedy chops, and his penchant for the run-on, single-sentence, keep-the-show-on-the-road poem. And the title circles around a preoccupying subject, death—where, in Hadrian’s words, the soul “will no longer have the usual entertainment.” Bolina bills ten poems as “elegies,” often sorted into tailormade subgenres. Even the hilariously specific “Once Upon a Toilet over the Alps (or Executive Platinum Elegy)” pierces through its sketch-comedy conceit (“a heart attack in the can at thirty-nine / thousand feet”—but look, “Alan Cumming is on / this flight!”) with poignant anxieties:

O heart, don’t shuck me now I’ve been upgraded
and for nothing but my mileage bonus, which I earned—

I and not all these organs capitulating to some other,
indecipherable obligation, and in business class no less