Invoking Fluidity: Genevieve Pfeiffer Reviews Aricka Foreman’s Salt Body Shimmer
“There are all kinds/ of intimate violence” Aricka Foreman writes in Salt Body Shimmer, the title found in one of her poems, “Consent Is A Labyrinth Of Yes.” Such a title threads together the body and the quotidian with the magic of the sea, till the two are inseparable: “when men/ ask me for water I know they mean my pussy” (70). She does not over-simplify water to equate it with healing, and instead complicates traditional European symbols, such as water, with a anticolonial history by invoking other Yoruba deities such as Yemaya and Oshun.
Foreman ushers us into this body of work, a book that holds both human body and bodies of water, through an invocation of Olukún, a Yoruba gender-fluid deity. Fluidity is one of the many wisdoms of this book, and Foreman deftly embodies, enacts, this fluidity — through the format of individual poems and the collection itself; in the movements and dance described; the music called upon in her lines and titles; the lyricism infused throughout her poems; and importantly, in the materiality of magic. There are prayers, dances, offerings and spells, descriptions of rootwork, and rootwork that turns out to be self-care by way of caring for hair.
Through this embodiment of water she explores love — familial; love with people who identify as both women and men; love with people of color and with those who are white; and particularly, self-love.
Sex — the kind that heals, and the kind that traumatizes — is essential to these questions. There are everyday moments when the speaker is lucid and unabashedly human, as in “I Got Mad Love”: “Masterbate before/ dressing for work, beat my face for the gods.” There are moments when strangers, friends, and family are starkly revealed as predators. To search for love is a dangerous act. To work at self love is necessary and requires certain deaths. “I lay my dress/ across their mouths, pour and wait to see/ which one won’t drown it’s the closest/ I’ve come to love though that’s not the right word” (70–1). So much is at stake when we write, laboring for the word right, and much more is revealed when we concede that there is no right word.
What does it mean to be a child with a family member who is a predator? How many ways can that shape the child as they grow, trying to understand what it is to be human, to be family? Or trust that romantic love is truly love — and if it is love, Salt Body Shimmer asks how can one simply trust — because one is woman, is Black, as in the poem “Always Something There To Remind Me” where “My lover texts How are you? I type his name like a prayer/ Michael Michael Michael Michael Michael/ Who? she asks Who?”
Salt Body Shimmer is saturated to bursting while constrained and stark. Foreman’s play with form, and her sparse and lyrical language, simultaneously swells and restrains. It is an offering, a prayer, a curse and a cry you continue to hear long after finishing the last poem.
Genevieve Pfeiffer is a poet, herbalist, and teacher. They are the Assistant Director at Anomaly and hosts its online reading series (join us!), while studying at NYU. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in About Place, Frost Meadow Review, Quail Bell Magazine, Birdcoat Quarterly, Juked, So to Speak, The Write Room, and others. They oscillate between NYC and the mountains, and you can find them where there are trees
Aricka Foreman is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit MI. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber, and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books), she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends her time in Chicago, IL engaging poetry with photography & video.
