Chicago Review of Books Reviews Five 2020 Poetry Collections

At Chicago Review of Books, Mandana Chaffa reviews five poetry collections from 2020 that she finds worth revisiting. "In Obit, Victoria Chang expresses her grief after the death of her mother in brief and powerful obituaries to all that she has lost," writes Chaffa, who also looks at Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony, Hafizah Geter's Un-American, Danez Smith's Homie, and Justin Phillip Reed's Malevolent Volume. On Geter:

Un-American, Hafizah Geter’s debut collection, also dissects the immigrant experience and the freighted question of who is American and who is not. Yet it is equally powerful as a tender and painful exploration of familial conflicts and connections. Her memories and perceptions are often so different from her sister’s and parents’ that they could each be from different countries, even when they inhabit the same space. Throughout this collection, one considers what unifies us, and what tears us apart, as well as how the desire to forge a new identity often shears away parts of us we may not want to lose: “Tonight the distance between me, my mother, and Nigeria / is like a jaw splashed against a wall.”—

Memory looms large in Geter’s collection—“I am a test   of how far a daughter’s memory can go”—as comfort, as pain, as shackle, as flight.

Read on at Chicago Review of Books.