BOA Editions

Burning of the Three Fires

annette — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Burning of the Three Fires marks the third collection of poems from Jeanne Marie Beaumont. Beaumont, who won a National Poetry Series award for her first book, experiments with form and examines the female condition in her latest collection. The result is a vibrant mix of poems that keep readers turning the pages and analyzing the words before them.

“Girl on a Scale,” though not atypical in form, vividly depicts an eating disorder. Beaumont utilizes imagery and diction seamlessly to convey the “ungrowing” of one who is suffering from body image and eating issues. As the speaker enters a dream-like world, filled with icicles that masticate air and saplings, she imagines her daughter standing at the edge of her bed in the form of a seabird. “But birds eat constantly,” she thinks, realizing it can’t be the same girl who lets “food fall away/from her mouth.” Some of the most striking lines that offer a realistic image of eating disorders are: “Not a gain again./Ungrown so thin she slipped/between the bars/and hunkered/inside her cage.” As the poem concludes, the speaker wakes up and sees “it was she in the bed,/toward her/the IV dripped dripped/like an early thaw.” It makes for a powerful ending to such a haunting poem.

The title poem, “Burning of the Three Fires,” gives readers the opportunity to do more of their own interpreting. While “Rite (to Combat a Bad Mood)” offers eight mostly nonsensical tips and observations that are uplifting and really do combat a sour mood.

“Channeling Sylvia: 8-Ball (Interrogation)” is a verbatim transcript from a Magic 8-Ball conversation Beaumont had with Sylvia Plath. It is humorous and deviates from the typical poem in its question-and-answer structure.

Burning of the Three Fires shows that Beaumont isn’t afraid to exercise her craft by experimenting with new forms of poetry. Her work offers a refreshing blend of phrases and images that intrigue and inspire.

Written by: Michelle Tooker, October 27th 2010

In the Time of the Girls

brittany — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Anne Germanacos

BOA Editions

When do you stop being a girl? When do you start? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be a girl? These questions are necessary ingredients in order to fully ingest Anne Germanacos’ debut work, In the Time of the Girls. An exploration of history and individual experience, the book forsakes the traditional plot-driven narrative for a collection of short stories which themselves are a mosaic of prose and dialogue infused vignettes, each individually titled.

Feminist theory discourages identifying women as a definitive group whose lives are bound to each other on the basis of a shared gender. However, I am consistently reminded how my experiences mirror those of the women I’ve encountered throughout my life. Germanacos shines in her ability to tap into the collective consciousness of women as she deftly articulates the moments where our lives intersect.

“Men on Crosses” is an abstract, yet poignant, story that uses biblical allegory to explore pregnancy, abortion, and the ever-present dichotomy of choice. “Sundering Twins” explores identity and sexuality through the relationship of two outcast individuals—“He was an orphan, she the lesser half of a pair.” My favorite stories include the titular chapter, “In the Time of the Girls,” a celebration of the many ways of being a girl, and “Infinity,” which begins by asking, “But was it a doll or a person, or both? And, who could say? The girls, I guess, who read the stories, or the mothers who read them to the little girls who couldn’t.”

In its best moments, In the Time of the Girls reads like a lost diary of your favorite Women’s Studies professor—one part feminist prose and one part academic text. A cacophony of insights, Germanacos bravely and creatively tackles gender, race, religion, imperialism, and more, always returning to the nebulous experience of being “girl.”

Written by: Alicia Sowisdral, September 29th 2010

Diwata

caitlin — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Barbara Jane Reyes

BOA Editions

As a librarian, when I’m asked for a recommended read by someone thirsty for tales, I instinctively direct them to the fiction stacks. I forget how poems, too, can be rich with narrative. Barbara Jane Reyes’ Diwata teems with stories. Exploring subjects like the creation of human life on earth, the phenomena of thunder and lightning, the violence that war and occupation inflict on women, and the complexity of the sea’s color, Diwata contains so much imagination and vision it’s hard to believe it’s just eighty-two pages long.

Reyes, a poet born in Manila, Philippines and currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, takes the title of her book from a word in Tagalog. The back of the book defines diwata as “a term for a mythical being who resides in nature, and whom human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease in order to live harmoniously in this world.” Diwatas make numerous appearances in Reyes’ poems, in some cases as the narrator, in others, as one situated in a temporally or spatially remote place, or one residing close by, implored by the poet to speak. In “Crossing,” a diwata visits a hunter in her sleep and helps her to cross a bridge between herself and her ancestors.

Among the themes that run through this book are the complications of human intimacy. The title of the first poem, “A Genesis of We, Cleaved,” uses a word that has two opposite meanings: to come together and to separate. Reyes writes in cleverly lyrical language in “Eve’s Aubade”: “Here I shall weave a selvedge of we.” In fiber art, a selvedge is an edge that keeps a work from fraying. This implies a woven-togetherness between the speaker and the beloved. And yet, a selvedge also suggests an edge, a deliberate marking off of where one ends and another begins.

The poems in Diwata are written in a range of forms, with some longer pieces like “The Fire, Around Which We All Gather” exploring a prose poem structure, and others, like “Polyglot Incantation,” juxtaposing lines in Tagalog, Spanish, and English. “The Villagers Sing of the Woman Who Becomes a Wave Who Becomes the Water Who Becomes the Wind” cleverly employs a braided pantoum pattern, mimicking the shapeshifting of the poem’s subject.

Reyes ends her collection with a stark and striking short poem, “Aswang,” presumably in the voice of a diwata. The speaker names herself “the bad daughter, the freedom fighter, the shaper of death masks,” and in the last line, says, “Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.” Here, we are confronted as humans who all too often use myths to perpetuate violence. We are left with a voice that insists against the misuses of mythology, a voice that will haunt us. This is an outsider voice of a deity misunderstood, a woman misunderstood, whose stories we must try harder to hear.

Written by: Vani Natarajan, September 28th 2010