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A review by sloatsj
Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
5.0
I first read an excerpt of a Girmay poem somewhere in isolation and it reminded me of the strangeness of some Garcia Lorca poems and weird boldness of Cesar Vallejo.
This is the second stanza of the poem “Kingdom Animalia” -
Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away
from the hair on the floor of his house
& how it got there Monday,
but my one heart falls
like a sad, fat persimmon
dropped by the hand of Turczyn’s old tree.
I want to sleep. I do not want to sleep.
That at once reminds me of Garcia Lorca’s Gacela of the Dark Death (I want to sleep the sleep of apples / I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries …) and of many odd, bold poems of Vallejo, such as Prayer on the Road (I don’t even know who this bitterness is for!).
In the same vein I loved “Science,” which begins:
We were trying to refind the eye & brain
we had when we were pelicans,
but the wind came down, it had ten hands,
it had more mouths & took & took us far to sea.
Girmay writes hauntingly about family, lost things and about injustice. I really enjoyed the striking and original voice. The book is split into six sections, the last one —"the book of one small thing"— contains just one poem. It’s terrific:
Ars Poetica
May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.
Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record
of the foot’s silver prayer.
I lived once.
Thank you.
It was here.
This is the second stanza of the poem “Kingdom Animalia” -
Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away
from the hair on the floor of his house
& how it got there Monday,
but my one heart falls
like a sad, fat persimmon
dropped by the hand of Turczyn’s old tree.
I want to sleep. I do not want to sleep.
That at once reminds me of Garcia Lorca’s Gacela of the Dark Death (I want to sleep the sleep of apples / I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries …) and of many odd, bold poems of Vallejo, such as Prayer on the Road (I don’t even know who this bitterness is for!).
In the same vein I loved “Science,” which begins:
We were trying to refind the eye & brain
we had when we were pelicans,
but the wind came down, it had ten hands,
it had more mouths & took & took us far to sea.
Girmay writes hauntingly about family, lost things and about injustice. I really enjoyed the striking and original voice. The book is split into six sections, the last one —"the book of one small thing"— contains just one poem. It’s terrific:
Ars Poetica
May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.
Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record
of the foot’s silver prayer.
I lived once.
Thank you.
It was here.