a portrait in blues an anthology
http://platypuspress.co.uk/aportraitinblues
By Anu Mahadev
In this current political climate voices are begging to be heard, to be validated and acknowledged. To that effect, “A Portrait in Blue” is a brave, fearless collection — these are pearls strung in variegated colors and shapes that have no intention of hiding themselves. This book is an in-your-face display of “identity, gender and bodies” — bodies wrought with expression, some celebratory, some violent, but in the end, all very human and real.
There is birth in “Beginning” where Jonathan Bay compares his “toes counted ten times over” like “the first clover ever found”, there is desire in “evening, before” — Terry Abrahams says to “bite down hard” because he wants “to look edible not perfect but passable.” There is violence in Anika Prakash’s “Girl’s color gone and bone given to an end” — a title borrowed from “Black Witch Moth” by Phillip B. Williams — where they find “her buried along with footprints in the earth that didn’t hold.” The common theme of the blues, whether sadness, anger, or beauty of water and sky, ensures there is no brushing through or half-hearted perusal here.
The truth, innocence and clarity that the poems demand are raw and exposed — from Laura Villareal’s “Hidden Roots,” where she writes “I don’t want your body to split lightning inside of me dishonestly” to the matter-of-fact declaration in Siaara Freeman’s “The Men Want to Know What Is Wrong”, she decides that they think her “wiring is faulty,” her “exhaust is thick” and she is “certainly a problem.” She skims over with just a hint of future danger by saying “I will be too busy making sure I can still run properly to answer.” There is also the dissolution of reality in a sort of firm belief in the deepest part of your existence in “Good Riddance” by Brianna Albers, where she says in SMS language, no less “ in any case, u realize it’s probably why u don’t wanna have sex w anyone that’s real bc that’d mean yr real & who wants to b real at a time like this?”
Violence to the self, if not self-inflicted, or forced, is then necessary, as JM Miller refers to “chest length scar” as a “hole so hollow a howl crawls in.” For that matter, each of these poems is essential and required to answer questions such as “Were you built to break, or were you built already broken?” Multi-dimensional identity is evident when Logan February is the cotyledon, the forest, the tree and mother to “sad children,” who are named after “the fault-lines inside palms.”
Just as Ali Blythe says, I conclude with his forlorn words, “I could say something beautiful if only I had until this pencil ran out. I would be so careful.” But, as “Kodachrome” ponders, “with a grief so unrelenting, who knows what really happened to me?”
Read this book, whether it be in sunken despair, to scoop out the hollows of your soul, in hurt, in solace, in love, in guilt, to “find an –ism living”, read for whatever reason resonates with you, but do read it for its lyrical grace, for its story-telling, for its spice-scented verses in “Febbraio, 1986,” find your reason, find your corner, and delve into the body, its existence, its identity.
