(Review of an ARC via Netgalley)

This was a really beautiful and evocative collection about language and cultural identity, and how America (and the white Western world in general) seeks to dampen both. Afiriyie-Hwedie's language here is really just phenomenal; she has an almost supernatural ability to tell the story of a whole life in one line of poetry, and although this collection is very short it feels complete, like not a single page or word is wasted. All the poems here are tightly crafted and layered with so many meanings that I think you could probably read this entire collection cover to cover multiple times and have a different experience every time.

Having said that, I did find some of the poems were a little hard to parse and I wasn't sure I fully comprehended all of them, but I chalked that up to the poet's experience being so very different from mine; there are things she's experienced and writes about that are a completely new frame of reference for me, a white monoglot who's lived in the same country my whole life. I still enjoyed the language of the poems, even those I didn't entirely understand.

As far as poetry collections go, this is one of the most impressive in terms of poetic technique and language that I've read this year, and it's obvious that Afiriyie-Hwedie is one of those poets who's going to end up on every MFA syllabus going, and she should.