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Silent Anatomies: 2014 Kore Press First Book Winner Selected by Joy Harjo by Monica Ong, Joy Harjo
jd_brubaker's review
5.0
There are some poetry books that you have to read more than once. Not because they're too complicated or because you didn't get them the first time; rather, the book carries in its pages so many visceral, raw truths that you can't absorb them all in one read through. Books that feel as though someone peered into your body, saw your trauma, and wrote an entire book of poems based on their study of your experiences. Books that find beauty in unconventional parts of the body.
This was one of those books.
Monica Ong's collection (selected by Joy Harjo, the U.S. incumbent Poet Laureate) examines grief in many different ways. It's a cross-genre book that incorporates both pictures of her family, as well as images and drawings of bodily organs, brain scans, and other miscellaneous objects. The book isn't long and the poems, too, are quite short. But the emotional weight of each line, each image, each section is tremendous. At times, I felt as though I was sucking in oxygen after holding my breath for almost too long; my lungs burned, my hands shook, I had to steady my breathing at different points.
Ong writes about family. She writes about race. She writes about culture. She writes about gender. She writes about loss and all the different ways it leaks into our lives, cultivating our attention and perpetuating further suffering. She writes about being a woman of color among a world of whiteness, of being pressured to be more like white people so that she can fit in, of facing misogyny and patriarchy among her own family structures. She writes about how generational trauma imprints on the body, and it's here that the images and drawings come into play. They heighten the canvas on which the poems are printed, calling the reader's eyes to move more slowly across the page.
Some of the poems seem, at first glance, to be the original images with their original identifiers. For instance, there's one drawing of a bodily organ and there are lines extending from different parts of the drawing to the names of those different body parts. If you read this poem too quickly, you'll think that nothing was altered, that the poem must be on the next page, or maybe even that the poem is the drawing itself. But that would be a mistake. The lines extending out from the drawing don't, in fact, point to the names of different tendons and muscles, but rather to lines of a poem written in a different language.
Another poem is a selection of different brain scans where the poem is both part of and separate from the image. On the image in a font that appears to be printed with the scan are small clusters of words. Beneath the image is what appears to be the poem. But when you take the time to read each line, study the image itself, and then work down to the text at the bottom, you realize that the entire thing is the poem. This might not seem novel, but the more this happens, the more you feel the weight of these poems in your body. To the point that you begin to wonder if these scans and drawings could, perhaps, be of your brain or your heart.
Silent Anatomies isn't just a journey of emotions, grief, trauma, and loss. It's a journey of the body. It's an examination of how we're all connected, and also how we're all set apart. And while the poems themselves feel heavy, they aren't cumbersome to read. In fact, I could have read the entire book in a single sitting. It's not even 100 pages long, and only a couple of poems take up one whole page. But that's the point of the book: even small wounds can cause harm for centuries. And only when we talk about our pain can we start to find healing.
This was one of those books.
Monica Ong's collection (selected by Joy Harjo, the U.S. incumbent Poet Laureate) examines grief in many different ways. It's a cross-genre book that incorporates both pictures of her family, as well as images and drawings of bodily organs, brain scans, and other miscellaneous objects. The book isn't long and the poems, too, are quite short. But the emotional weight of each line, each image, each section is tremendous. At times, I felt as though I was sucking in oxygen after holding my breath for almost too long; my lungs burned, my hands shook, I had to steady my breathing at different points.
Ong writes about family. She writes about race. She writes about culture. She writes about gender. She writes about loss and all the different ways it leaks into our lives, cultivating our attention and perpetuating further suffering. She writes about being a woman of color among a world of whiteness, of being pressured to be more like white people so that she can fit in, of facing misogyny and patriarchy among her own family structures. She writes about how generational trauma imprints on the body, and it's here that the images and drawings come into play. They heighten the canvas on which the poems are printed, calling the reader's eyes to move more slowly across the page.
Some of the poems seem, at first glance, to be the original images with their original identifiers. For instance, there's one drawing of a bodily organ and there are lines extending from different parts of the drawing to the names of those different body parts. If you read this poem too quickly, you'll think that nothing was altered, that the poem must be on the next page, or maybe even that the poem is the drawing itself. But that would be a mistake. The lines extending out from the drawing don't, in fact, point to the names of different tendons and muscles, but rather to lines of a poem written in a different language.
Another poem is a selection of different brain scans where the poem is both part of and separate from the image. On the image in a font that appears to be printed with the scan are small clusters of words. Beneath the image is what appears to be the poem. But when you take the time to read each line, study the image itself, and then work down to the text at the bottom, you realize that the entire thing is the poem. This might not seem novel, but the more this happens, the more you feel the weight of these poems in your body. To the point that you begin to wonder if these scans and drawings could, perhaps, be of your brain or your heart.
Silent Anatomies isn't just a journey of emotions, grief, trauma, and loss. It's a journey of the body. It's an examination of how we're all connected, and also how we're all set apart. And while the poems themselves feel heavy, they aren't cumbersome to read. In fact, I could have read the entire book in a single sitting. It's not even 100 pages long, and only a couple of poems take up one whole page. But that's the point of the book: even small wounds can cause harm for centuries. And only when we talk about our pain can we start to find healing.
pdedgar's review
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Minor: War and Medical content
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