Seven Unexpectedly Intimate Poetry Books to Read in March

In three of this month’s collections, we find ourselves in the shower with the speaker. In Armen Davoudian’s opening poem, a mother and son: the speaker steps out in his mother’s “lavender robe de chambre,” careful not to spill though “you’d forgive the spillage, or forget.” The poem ends, “What else will you love me despite?” In Jordan Pérez’s “The Glory Has Departed,” a daughter watches her mother: “I watch her after through the shower glass, / smell the thick oleanders wilt, / sense her wild mourning, see / that she has shaved off all of her hair.” Nick Lantz’s speaker finds a lump in the shower in his collection’s opening poem: the next poem reveals it is cancer. In Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation , a turn to a childhood birthmark or “pig’s freckle” that has “faded over time.” These unexpected intimacies mirror another kind of nakedness, sensibilities that strip down the veil between personal–domestic, familial, erotic, artistic–and state violences, past and present. These collections are not solipsistic, nor even autobiographical. The stakes are high. In Michael Ondaatje’s “Stella,” the speaker asks, “Now we are less. How do we become more? // How to die courteous and beautiful / protecting her house, guarding our door.” * Mirror Nation – Choi, Don Mee Don Mee Choi, Mirror Nation (Wave Books) “My father waved to me across a vast distance, from his present dimension: We are still not OK!” Don Mee Choi concludes her hybrid trilogy, which includes Hardly War (2016) and DMZ Colony (2020), with Mirror Nation, a finale that begins in Berlin in 2019 at an artist residency, when the poet, discovers—through “remote waves,” and more tangibly, a photo—her photojournalist father on the bridge between Berlin and Potsdam. At the center of Mirror Nation , the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, the year also marked by a photocopy of Choi’s “Hong Kong Adult ID” and the Miami riots. At the book’s center, also, grief: “Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony. I notice grief has a lone […]

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