Homes

In Moheb Soliman’s Homes, the poet choreographs the ecology of the Great Lakes, decentering the human in favor of relational intimacy with water, algae, port, and moss. In the poem “In Ontario but far from Superior or these missed parts,” we read:

You do not arrive.
The Place arrives
You are alive
We are alive.

This playfulness with pronouns acts as a deliberate reformation of the speaker-muse dynamics. Other poems seem to bemoan the limitations of language itself to encompass the environment: “Language was impossible; vowels confused with consonants––water and continent were one—consonants, and continents; with water, and vowels—.” The collection might be seen as an intentionally failed ars poetica of nature writing, and this is its strength.

There is some ontological determinism running throughout, such as when the poet pleads “Please be real beach” and “[p]lease be real sand” and later, “please, outlive me.” Elsewhere, the poet views the water coming in from the lakeshore as teleological, unable to reverse its causality or go back from “where you came from” or stay “where you [are] not from.” Such is the tricky balance of Homes, whose title is suggestive of domesticity even as it opens up the question of how we can interpret the incomprehensible wildness of the infrastructure, fauna, population, and technology of this region that might be beyond signification.

Soliman’s poetry demonstrates technical prowess in its use of slant rhyme and assonance and while it does sometimes end up reproducing the same romanticized tropes of the natural world that it critiques (stewardship over the land, marking territory, “nature” as existential plot device), these poems also ask us to reconsider the relationship between the meditative lyric, with its fidelity to human consciousness, and the kind of poetry that wishes to engage more with sensibilities of the non-human. What we are left with wondering is, who are the “us” and “our” and “we” of these poems and who is the “I” at their center?