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camilleberedjick's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
4.5
"Few things tie us together more than our need to dig up the right words to justify ourselves."
That's one of several lines in Camille T. Dungy's book of poetry, Trophic Cascade, that stopped me in my tracks. This short but powerful collection weaves together narratives of nature, motherhood, and racial injustice to ask big questions about what we're doing here and why we matter. I'm taking a class with the writer later this month and wanted to familiarize myself with her work beforehand, and I really loved it. Highly recommend.
That's one of several lines in Camille T. Dungy's book of poetry, Trophic Cascade, that stopped me in my tracks. This short but powerful collection weaves together narratives of nature, motherhood, and racial injustice to ask big questions about what we're doing here and why we matter. I'm taking a class with the writer later this month and wanted to familiarize myself with her work beforehand, and I really loved it. Highly recommend.
pastabrain's review
4.0
A lovely collection of poems. Three or four of them will stay with me for a very very long time.
freechasetoday's review against another edition
5.0
“Perhaps I could fabricate an image to represent this // agony, but the steward has walked into the galley / of history. There is nothing figurative about us.” To read any book of poems is to engage in a practice of conversation; within that conversation is, hopefully, a mix of sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience. For me to read this magnificent collection is to be called to confront the issues and subjects that challenge me most fiercely—the impact of humanity on our environment, the subjugation and disempowerment of many, the contradictions of how to consider my (and my world’s) history and legacy while also attending to the matters of my day-to-day life, all alongside the beauty and wonder of life in its myriad forms. That I chose it haphazardly from my stack this morning, after another attempted murder of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by the police in this country, makes its truths stand even more starkly and call me even more fervently to be in the world in a way that these poems are.
hignah's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
fast-paced
5.0
From an introduction to a reading by Camille T. Dungy:
Camille T. Dungy, the author of four books of poetry was born in Denver but moved often. It is no surprise, then, that her poetry is filled with motion and displacement, sometimes travel and adventure, sometimes flight. Even what might seem stable or rooted, like an overflowing collection of Sports Illustrated magazines in the poem ‘Still life’, is painted as precarious or fleeting. One might call this realism.
Camille T. Dungy, the author of four books of poetry was born in Denver but moved often. It is no surprise, then, that her poetry is filled with motion and displacement, sometimes travel and adventure, sometimes flight. Even what might seem stable or rooted, like an overflowing collection of Sports Illustrated magazines in the poem ‘Still life’, is painted as precarious or fleeting. One might call this realism.
The word ‘trophic’ is defined as ‘relating to feeding and nutrition.’ The title poem of the collection illustrates the power of diversity, what Joanna Zylinska terms Relationality, with joyous urgency. Under Dungy’s gaze, cycles of birth and death, grief and joy, take on their rightful symbiotic brilliance. In poems like ‘Frequently Asked Questions: #4’ and ‘From the First, Body was Dirt,’ motherhood and evolution, feeding and nutrition, become erotic subjects. In conversation with poets such as William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, JM Coetzee, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ilya Kaminsky, the poet and marine biologist Eva Saulitist, and collage artist Romare Bearden, she simultaneously shows us intimate details of her own life and what we all might lose if we choose not to live considerately.
I read Trophic Cascade with the same joyous urgency with which I describe the title poem, even those poems that are painful. Dungy’s treatment of grief and pain is unflinching, and that is what makes it bearable--the blunt recognition of its existence and even necessity. As I read, a line from her introduction to Black Nature, a poetry anthology which she edited, takes residence in my mind. She quotes bell hooks: “When black people migrated to urban cities, this humanizing connection with nature was severed… When this thinking was coupled with a breakdown in religiosity, a refusal to recognize the sacred in everyday life, it served the interests of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
Well, takes residence is not quite right. I have been thinking of this line since I read it in June. In fact, I have it underlined and the page flagged, I photographed the quote and sent it out across the country. Finally, I felt, someone has given me permission, and not only permission, but reason, and not only reason, but necessity, to believe in magic again! Dungy’s poetry suggests that magic exists in every particle of matter, including our own. These poems recognize the sacred in everyday life, point out the magic in medicine and mothering, the life in death, the joy in responsibility to our families and to our ecologies. Trophic Cascade is an example of subversion through creation and acknowledgement of beauty, radicalism through observation, through breathing in this world.
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