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qqjj's review against another edition
challenging
funny
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
2.0
I would read a poem aloud to myself and I liked how the words sounded together and the rhythms, but any meaning just sort of washed over me and I would realize I hadn't really ingested what had been written in any meaningful way.
alj24's review against another edition
4.0
Jaswinder Bolina's unique wordsmithing shines in these poems—for better or for worse. He brings his own voice into the conversation about what America is, and it is refreshing for the most part. Some poems are way too complex and don't seem to have a greater meaning; others are inventive and bring new perspectives. I found I liked the poems the more I read, so maybe I just had to get used to the style. If you like thinking about the current anxieties about America and want a change of pace from newspaper articles and think pieces about it, you should consider this book. My favorites were "What We Call a Mountain in a Valley, They Call a Hill on the Mountain" and "The Tallest Building in America."
robhendricks's review
5.0
[Omnidawn staff review] Jaswinder Bolina's citizen personae are wide awake and zinging. Sparkling with the energies of outrage with tenacious and sardonic whimsy, with wit and intelligence, with the language of protective force. His anecdodalists, too, seethe and glow with compassionate and hilarious anger. They come out swinging, packing their grotesqueries chock-a-block with the dreck and submerged violence of the USA's cultural life. One of them longs (from the bar) for an intervention by extraterrestrial messiahs with better taste in art. Another renounces all knowledge of the world's suffering in order to just be in love.
The voices of these poems have got the big picture on death. You might hear some of them accompanied by the daughters of the dead of Deraa, if they deign. Two poems in this book, for example, end with the trope of full-throated (full-hearted) song ("Supremacy" and "Second Variation on a Theme by César Vallejo"): enacting nightmare upon nightmare in first-person confrontational surges, brightly knowing speakers -- who seem sadly cognizant of the likelihood of facing off with some xenophobic, nationalistic, potentially fatal counterpart, some "grope of the king," "fitful, "fretful." They come face-forward in hardy good faith, compassionately aware of how worldviews are nurtured by layers of mediation ("cable modem... watercolor" and "scripture ruthless").
Jaswinder Bolina's quirky voicers step forward, turning the tables, blotto with bright animus, in a great variety of ways in this exceptional book of poems. All of these poems sing (and many sear) sometimes looking back from the future embracingly, even upon the great many possible permutations of death to come, be it violent or mundane. May the daughters, if it please them to, sing. Even "Jaswinder Bolina" is alive amongst these deadly funny, acrobatic, searching, wildly imaginative, defiant poems, as one of a host of sharp and singular observers, grounded in the painful, nutty, ugly particulars of time and place.
The voices of these poems have got the big picture on death. You might hear some of them accompanied by the daughters of the dead of Deraa, if they deign. Two poems in this book, for example, end with the trope of full-throated (full-hearted) song ("Supremacy" and "Second Variation on a Theme by César Vallejo"): enacting nightmare upon nightmare in first-person confrontational surges, brightly knowing speakers -- who seem sadly cognizant of the likelihood of facing off with some xenophobic, nationalistic, potentially fatal counterpart, some "grope of the king," "fitful, "fretful." They come face-forward in hardy good faith, compassionately aware of how worldviews are nurtured by layers of mediation ("cable modem... watercolor" and "scripture ruthless").
Jaswinder Bolina's quirky voicers step forward, turning the tables, blotto with bright animus, in a great variety of ways in this exceptional book of poems. All of these poems sing (and many sear) sometimes looking back from the future embracingly, even upon the great many possible permutations of death to come, be it violent or mundane. May the daughters, if it please them to, sing. Even "Jaswinder Bolina" is alive amongst these deadly funny, acrobatic, searching, wildly imaginative, defiant poems, as one of a host of sharp and singular observers, grounded in the painful, nutty, ugly particulars of time and place.
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