Over the You About You

turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, by Rosebud Ben-Oni.
Get Fresh Books, $20.

In turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, Rosebud Ben-Oni’s speaker gives us the “queerest part” of herself in the form of Matarose, her alter ego. We’re introduced to Matarose in the collection’s opening poem, “Matarose Tags G-Dragon on the 7,” where we learn that “Mata’s quite meta / Mata means kill / Rose a curve / from the real meat of it all / She’s part my little pony.” This opening poem is made all the more fun with an epigraph to K-Pop supergroup BIGBANG, grounding us in a book filled with pop culture references.

Matarose lives in Queens, New York, and she’s a queen herself—a club girl who’s “hungry like a wolf,” inspired by supermodels and icons like Yasmin Le Bon and Iman. Matarose is fearless and she kills with just one look, intimidating men—“My man is a little afraid / of mata     he accepts her tho.” Ben-Oni’s speaker constantly gives us meta: she basks in the cultural references of her childhood, yet she transcends them. If popular culture serves as commentary that combines the politics and social critiques of a time period, then the poet takes this up ten notches, presenting popular culture from both her coming-of-age youth and the present moment in time. In this collection, we’re inundated with images that are all femme, from K-Pop stars to off-duty models to Spice Girls to mermaids rising from the ocean, all while an ’80s soundtrack of Bonnie Tyler, Duran Duran, and Cyndi Lauper plays in the background. We’re also presented with images of women as multitudes: the speaker gives us her mixed heritage, with both Latinx and Hebrew references, along with scenes in Hong Kong, dancing and eating hot pot.

The collection’s self-referential “meta” nature applies not only to questions of womanhood and identity, but also to how we evaluate common themes in poetry. Ben-Oni’s work is both personal and steeped in poetic traditions. For instance, “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” serves as a love letter to American-Japanese model Kiko and a love letter to the moon. This epistle speaks to poetry’s longstanding love affair with the moon—probably the most referenced celestial body in literature. It’s easy to romanticize the moon because of  its nightly allure. It’s also common to give the lunar body a female designation. To combat these prevalent poetic moves, Ben-Oni presents the moon not merely as a place of yearning, but also a place of romantic rendezvous—action takes place on this moon:

Oh moon we’re over the you about you

Dear moon do you need a tundra to look after

             tú      dear familiar      dear shipwrecker

salamander with wings of swallowtail

                                             lucky charm fisher-

queen waterless & aloof

It’s just us two & we are twisters
that don’t leave the ground to [    ]

“Moon” and “you” become interchangeable. The wordplay is clever; instead of being “over the moon about you,” we’re “over the you about you,” acknowledging the moon’s long influence on poetry. This move is amplified later on in the poem with “we’re over ^{the you} of you” as the scene on the moon becomes illustrated with “wolves” and “dew” and “gravity so star power / we vogue.” It’s the poem’s version of an exponential equation, yielding to the moon’s infinite power. Here, the moon also queers everything, not just romantically, but also poetically: “It’s just us two & we are twisters” (not sisters).

In a sense, I read turn around, BRXGHT XYXS as a poetic striptease. The women speakers in these poems are wild, glamorous, and untamed. They’re “girls [who] just wanna we just wanna” (“If Noah the Younger Sister”) and we’re left with this poetic cliffhanger in multiple points in the collection. In fact, in “Despite Their Best Efforts,” the speaker identifies herself in the poem as “I was but the cliffhanger / from the great flood”:

babbling to a broken city
The future
crumbling bricks
and overcrowding
I am the first language
no one is speaking
Mira a different world
This is my blood and this
my body this time
you won’t betray me
I am your kingdom come
the barricades
giving way mira even
the liquor stores are closing

The speaker’s “cliffhanger” identification works on multiple levels. On the level of language, Ben-Oni uses punctuation sparingly, thus giving her poetry a never-ending tease quality. Even the final line of “Despite Their Best Efforts”—“the liquor stores are closing”—seems to invite more action. The speaker’s “cliffhanger” identification also works on another level, that is, it signals the queering that is present throughout the entire book. By “queering,” I do not only mean with regards to sexuality, but also with regards to how traditional biblical images become both flipped and feminized. The speaker’s statements “I am the first language” and “I am your kingdom come” certainly qualify.

Other examples of Ben-Oni’s biblical queering include the poems “If Noah the Younger Sister” and “If Cain the Younger Sister.” In the latter, the brother is described as a “whitewashed synagogue,” whereas the speaker has blood on her hands:

Brother I’d like to have said brother
You are the fort and I am the death wish,
Sacrificing all
At last stand.
Brother, the blood
On my hands. Brother,
You are the home and I am the wilderness.

Perhaps the greatest study of Ben-Oni’s feminizing lies in the aptly titled “Even Doves Have Pride.” Ben-Oni always places a woman’s experience at the center:

It’s the straight girl I dated who’s the most outraged
I married a man, who confessed behind curved hand
Just how much she hated
What I could give her again
And again. Back then I believed her. Truly.
Don’t put me in a poem, she said, then read
One meant for another
And thanked me. It takes a woman, she guessed.

I love the repetition of “again,” hinting at both unparalleled sexual tension and repeated romantic mistakes. It’s a risky move to include the word “poem” in a poem, but Ben-Oni pulls it off  seamlessly, especially with the response of “It takes a woman.” This meta technique also extends to the poet: “In real life, I’m smaller than I appear / On screen. Whose screen.” The narrative is incredibly self-aware: the speaker acknowledges the lasting imprint a poem leaves, especially when it references a former lover. In addition, the poet smartly moves from studying culture, with earlier references to Caravaggio and Caffe Reggio, to becoming that culture, starting with “Someone might see us.” The speaker becomes magnified on the screen as she likes “a lot of photos on Instagram” and “Snapchat[s] a savage dinner.” The poem ends with “How do I get  you alone tonight?” The speaker is vulnerable, and she exudes this vulnerability powerfully, from every angle.

_____
 

Arias, by Sharon Olds.
Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95.

Arias, by the unparalleled Sharon Olds, follows her 2016 collection, Odes. An aria is a song by a single voice, and Arias, the collection, may be succinctly titled, but these poems evoke an expansive, even voluptuous nature, touching on subjects of “humanness,” “animalness,” and “motherness” (“Fear of Motherhood Aria”), along with “godlessness” and “femaleness” (“My Godlessness”). These arias are filled with sensuality and love, or as the speaker of “Aria Above Seattle” says, “I love the word / love, I want to wear it as the human clothing.”

Though the collection is titled Arias, “Arias” is the second of six sections in this book, which includes “Meeting a Stranger,” “Run Away Up,” “The New Knowing,” “Elegies,” and “First Child.” Arguably, Olds draws attention to “Arias” because this section presents multiple responses to her lifelong body of work, through a signature form. In addition, the song-like and expansive aspects of the aria serve as a strong narrative grounding point in the collection, as we travel from A to Z. As a longtime virtuoso, Olds doesn’t just create a signature form, she also plays with two forms at once: the book’s table of contents reads like an aria abecedarian, from “A” with “Aria to Our Miscarried One, Age 50 Now,” “Aria Above Seattle,” and “Anal Aria” to “B” with “Bay Area Aria,” “Bonnard Aria,” and “Breaking Bad Aria,” down the 26-letter alphabet, ending with “X Y Z Aria.” It forms an encyclopedia of   human experience and poetic tradition.

Poetry is filled with forms that are reminiscent of song, from the sonnet, which is translated as “little song” from the original Italian, to the ballad, which is a form that relies on both refrain and rhyme, to the bop, a musical argument created during a summer Cave Canem retreat. Poetry and music have always worked hand in hand. The poems in Arias similarly work hand in hand to question our relationships to each other through our histories and our intimacies. For example, “Meeting a Stranger” begins:

When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting.
Your mother is there, and your father is there,
and my mother and father. And our people—back from our
folks, back—are there, and what they
might have had to do with each other;
if one of yours, and one of mine
had met, what might have happened is there
in the room with us.

All poems contain turns, or the moment in the poem’s “argument” or narrative where the reader feels a shift, whether it’s physical, emotional, or spiritual. A change occurs in the poem that allows it to transform—to surprise. Olds’s arias contain many shifts. In this poem, Olds acknowledges that we contain complexities because of the people who made us and because of  the people we encounter. Metaphorically, the room in “Meeting a Stranger” fills up with these beings, past and present. Two people enter the room and they carry the presences of   both their parents and their ancestors. After all these beings meet, the poem then converges into a central argument that we are all linked because we are human:

          And if you’re a woman in the city
where you live, and I am staying at
the hotel where you work, and if you have brought me
my breakfast on a tray—though you and I have not
met, before, we are breathing in
our lineages, together.

Flesh and breath, whether it’s the skin on our bodies or the rawness of emotion, is what connects us: “interest of my flesh now sharing your breath, / your flesh my breath.” Having human flesh is the experience that we can all relate to. One human being who inhabits a flesh (or body) may not personally know another human being who inhabits another flesh (or body), but as the speaker states, we’re all “breathing in / our lineages together.” Through this shared act, the speaker tries to find a spiritual understanding with the strangers in the poem. The speaker is empathetic, but her privilege does not allow her to fully understand the histories of those around her. However, she takes responsibility and states the necessity to protect others to the same degree as one would for a family member.

The book’s second section, “Arias,” opens with “Aria to Our Miscarried One, Age 50 Now,” which presents a rebirth as the conceit of the poem. It’s significant that this poem opens the signature section, because it also serves as a companion piece and lyrical follow-up to Olds’s earlier “To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now,” from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stag’s Leap. This earlier poem contains the striking lines, “as if a thousand years from now / you and I are in some antechamber / where the difference between us is of  little matter.” This contained scene of the antechamber that brings out the similarities between speaker and her miscarried child echoes hauntingly in “Meeting a Stranger,” where, again, breathing serves as the religious and spiritual connectivity of  human experience. Thus, in Arias we see Olds’s signature themes, from the effects of the thirty-year marriage, to the body in relation to the self and others, and to the self in relation to the earth.

The speaker of “Aria to Our Miscarried One, Age 50 Now” opens with an invocation to the miscarried child: “Once again, I turn and address you,/not knowing who you were or what / you were. You had been three months inside me.” This invocation that starts with “Once again” also signifies the speaker’s nod to the earlier work. Later in the aria, the speaker takes this direct-address confrontation one step further, following the pattern with “Hello, male or female, / or both, or neither. Hi mystery, / hi matter, hi spirit moving through matter.” This acknowledgement continues at the ending:

                                  Dear one, I feel
as if you’re my elder, you having departed—
though without having breathed—much earlier than I.
By the time I saw you, you were back in the ocean
already, the sacred toilet-water green
of your grave. Let me call you kin, lost one,
let me call you landsman.

The word choice of “landsman” resonates. With this final word, which is an address to a fellow countryman, the speaker seems to be begging for a birth of the child, especially given the emphasis on “Dear one,” marking the third turn of the poem, right after the “I turn and address you.” In addition, “landsman” in italics emphasizes the bond between the mother and the unborn child: the mother is calling out to her kind, her lost one. Arias is a wonderful study of last lines, because each last line, like this one, reaches for a deeper emotional core.

Olds also makes us question how our relationships to each other and ourselves reflects our treatment of the earth. In “Nevada City, Calif., Aria,” the speaker closes with the line, “because we hate ourselves / we are igniting the earth.” This comes after the speaker reveals, “I am desperate to love myself, to tolerate myself.” The speaker’s pull toward her inner thoughts of desperation and the craving for self-love is a central moment that also questions the relationship between the destruction of the earth and the destruction of the self. In “Apocalypse Approaching as I’m Aging,” the speaker also confronts the earth’s destruction: “it was the end of the world, reaching back / like the silence when you leave a lover / who’s impossible, but whom you love.” Olds gives us a projection outward with “the end of the world,” but in this moment of urgency, we are confronted with a scene of tenderness, metaphorically, “like the silence when you leave a lover/who’s impossible.” We then get a response to this later on in the poem:

It’s like
falling in love with yourself, the one
who had been the villain.
When I understand
that the world will end, that we will have made it
unlivable for ourselves.

The speaker holds herself accountable by calling herself “the villain”: we are responsible for nursing both ourselves and the planet we live on. In a lifetime, we will all hopefully reach the understanding that “the world will end,” but will it then be too late?

In “The Enchantment,” in the book’s third section, Olds returns to familial relationships:

When I said, to my mother, What was a good
thing about me as a child?, my mother’s
face seemed to unfurl from the center,
hibiscus in fast motion, the anthers
and flounces springing out with joy.

It’s a beautiful moment, the mother’s joy at recounting her daughter’s childhood: “Oh you were / enchanting.” The speaker then relates the gaze her mother admires to her own gaze in photos. It’s another beautiful volta, one that swerves toward the central image of the speaker’s face. It’s a moment that makes similar moves to Olds’s 2015 poem, “After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood,” which also opens with unfurling motion:

When you tilted toward me, arms out
like someone trying to walk through fire,
when you swayed toward me, crying out you were
sorry.

The opening moment of “The Enchantment” is filled with tenderness and warmth—a central movement toward love. Throughout Arias, Olds unpacks moments of “humanness” and “animalness,” but she always distinguishes the humanness through the power of language, or as the speaker states in the ending aria, “X Y Z Aria,” “the last breath that each gave me / out of their mouth, to return to them / the alphabet they trusted me with.” Olds has a nuanced emotion for every letter of  the alphabet and beyond.