The Black Condition ft. Narcissus by Jayy Dodd

Someone to replace the sounds, I would’ve tried and searched

There’s a gone light flooding in my mind and so I searchįor something that usually not be wanting touch. Baban makes visible on the page the work of accuracy, generosity, and belonging, and how to “write around the space” of absence.Ĭould I forget how I, offering an extension, became the search?

I’m grateful for the way this chapbook locates in time and place, while situating its poems in a great continuum. I’m so excited to keep reading work by this poet. Baban, a Pakistan-born, Afghan Kurdish poet raised in Michigan, just graduated from the First Wave program at University of Wisconsin. Through erasures, ghazals, a sonnet, and other inventions and conversations through form, Baban’s deeply dialogical poems wonder about family, nation, god, love, and narrative itself. They take the distillation I love about poetry in the first place, and bring it to bear on the book as a whole. What I Know of the Mountains by Hajjar Baban (Anhinga Press, 2019) These poems are irreverent, lucid, and intimate while staying in motion. Enjambment mixes with voice into something like breath and what flows through it. Antigua’s candor woke me up, and as for the formal dexterity, I danced with it. It reads as a history of learning the erotic, which is sometimes that explosive force that could change everything if we let it, and other times a kind of boredom or even violence. I want to describe this as a book of poems about having a penetrable body, which we all do, don’t we? In Ugly Music, the body desires, betrays, and makes everything possible, even pleasurable, despite the mind.

Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua (YesYes Books, 2019)

The Black Condition ft. Narcissus by Jayy Dodd