On Nicole Sealey’s ‘Ordinary Beast’
Sealey’s poetry collection is a well-crafted puzzle that dares to be challenged head-on, promising that its full form is not what it seems.
Nicole Sealey
Poetry
80 pages
6” x 9”
Hardcover
Also available in eBook formats
Review Format: eBook
ISBN 9780062688804
First Edition
Ecco
New York, New York, USA
Available HERE
$24.99
It is rumored gods grow
where the blood of a hanged man drips.(“Even the Gods,” p 54).
Picking up Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, I expected it to be a one-sitting type of read. The experience turned out to be quite different, as I spent several hours poring over the poems, my impression of the collection changing from puzzled to awestruck to appreciative. It left me not only convinced that Sealey is a master of her craft, but also renewed my appreciation for the process of reading and responding to poetry. Ordinary Beast is like a well-crafted puzzle that dares to be challenged head-on, promising that its full form is not what it seems.
From the beginning, Sealey’s poems aim for the underbelly with their approach to the topics of sexuality, colonialism, and gender, keeping the reader company at all times with the inescapable presence of another individual. Rather than feeling watched, the effect is one of self-regulation on the reader’s part, following the rhythm of each consecutive poem and asking, “How do the words make me feel? Was I expecting this?” Sealey shows that there are myriad ways to ask and answer, stripping away the dichotomy of one question/one answer. Instead, the collection focuses on continuity in subject and tone, the lines
I want a white
house in Peekskill, far from the city — white
picket fence fencing in my lily-white
lilies.(“Legendary,” p 6)
carrying over into consecutive poems, such as “In Igboland,” which declares that
The West in me wants the mansion
to last. The African knows it cannot.(“In Igboland,” p 12).
Often, sequence poems feel like an easy, almost safe way out of the constant fast and direct pace of individual, self-contained poems. With Sealey, this is never the case, as the poem “Legendary” proves. The writing speaks for itself so clearly and confidently that one doesn’t want to do anything other than let it carry him away. It was this poem that made me feel like I was being invited into the collection despite my personal inability to relate to some of the struggles and injustices mentioned in the poem. There is an effective simplicity to each part of the sequence that appeals to the sensitive core found in all of us, and Sealey’s satirical quip at the stereotypical white dream thus found its mark with me in a slightly different way, resonating with my continued confusion as an immigrant to North America who still finds many Western ideas foreign, including the bizarre suburban American Dream life.
These have been examples of poetic excellence that I was hoping, even expecting, to find in Ordinary Beast, but the true strength of the collection lay in the poems that appeared sporadically like mystery boxes, springing up among the others, their contents wonderful surprises that one doesn’t know what to do with right away. The two poem pairs — “Candelabra With Heads” and “In Defense of ‘Candelabra With Heads,’” as well as “Clue” and “Cue” — are worth paying special attention to, as they’re Sealey’s challenge to how the writer’s craft is perceived. They show the reader both progress and a glimpse into the “writer’s logic” through the inclusion of both the original poem and its erasure version, in the case of the “Clues,” as well as in the explanatory tone of “In Defense Of.” Another noteworthy poem in this regard was “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You,’” which demonstrates how context shapes our appreciation of writing, for it is only from the notes in the back that the reader learns that the entire piece is composed solely of lines taken from the works of other poets.
There were only a few poems that felt pale compared to the complex vibrancy found in the majority of the poems. This was particularly the case with “Happy Birthday to Me,” whose tone is more contemporary and jagged for modernity’s sake. It was also the first time that I found myself disagreeing with some of the images used by a poet, like when Sealey tells the reader
A body, I’ve read, can sustain
its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours.
It’s the mind. It’s the mind that cannot.(“A Violence,” p 2).
These were the only moments when her poems’ hold slipped on me, when I became preoccupied with pondering over how “truthful” such statements were.
In the context of the entire collection, these instances were so negligible that they will likely only be dwelled upon by readers who enjoy sinking their teeth analytically into their poetry, both to agree with and to challenge the poet and to see as many facets of the piece as possible. I was comfortably captivated by poems like “Virginia for Lovers,” my favorite, and was too swept up by the quirky and charming “An Apology for Trashing Magazines in Which You Appear.” I haven’t encountered a poet like Sealey, who is an advocate for intersectionality and whose work is best described in this very same way. She’s someone I’ll be keeping my eye out for, as she is not only in-tune with the everyday life around her, but is also a kind of reporter on the world of the supernatural, demystifying it and making it accessible by reminding us that
Even the eyes of gods
must adjust to light. Even gods have gods.(“Even the Gods,” p 54).
