Mass for Shut-Ins

The coda to Mary-Alice Daniel’s striking debut collection, Mass for Shut-Ins, concludes: “Myself, I mean to unseal an erratic inheritance— // so goes unruly alchemy, the dream world /our dread life.” Born in Nigeria to a “native tribe [that] is > 99 Islamic,” and raised in England and Tennessee by parents “educated indoctrinated within Catholic, Lutheran, and Baptist missionary institutions,” Daniel notes, “[r]eligious fusion and fervor long framed my life.”

From her “erratic inheritance,” Daniel spins eclectically rigorous poems that reverberate with a Plathian edge and ear. A group of hell poems includes “One Hell,” which begins, “One for busybodies / One for frying chickens alive,” and later moves in for the kill:

One for butterfly collecting
—god what an evil hobby—
gassing living things to itemize
   in your hovel in England

“Red Hell,” like many of Daniel’s poems, starts with both thesis and one-liner: “You can do to a body a lot of things. / A Smithsonian feature on cannibalism makes me hungry.” By the end of the poem, the speaker makes her mark: “I reckon cannibals use bodies like the rest of us: / radical application of questions ordinary or extraordinary.”

Daniel is herself in the business of such questioning, as in “Revivalism 101”:

You never wonder what demons do in downtime.
They’re flat characters, not hobbyists.

But once, under a revival tent in Advent, it came out—
Keymakers, the preacher said.

Goldbeaters. Machinists. Weavers, Welders, Menders.

You should have figured only a Paperhanger could
wall in dreams with doodles of pre-cancerous parents.

Only a Taxidermist could handle a corpse long after
you questioned why the fat heart hadn’t given out—

The section “Anti-Noir Series” focuses on Los Angeles, offering such titles as “Murderabilia” and “Hagiography of a Pillar of Salt.” Here the speaker of “Indifferent Paradise” imagines possible deaths across L.A., from the “fixed-income hotel” to “techno-sized unreality,” concluding:

When the Health Department holds its annual burial
for the unclaimed dead, honoring 1547+ indigents
whose remains share storage space in our country crypt,
take care not to mistake me for my body double, then—
 
unearth me