laura_sackton's Reviews (170)

Stunning, stunning, stunning. A flood and an emptying out. So much ringing ringing blood imagery. This is such a bodily book, such a tumultuous book, such a tangled and beautiful book. So much in this book. Such singing poems. Loved.

Long review:

Oh, wow, this is an incredible collection. It’s about being a woman, bodies, blood and periods and illness and cancer and fertility and infertility and men and being seen and not seen by men, and Mary, and women in Islam and what the Quran says about women and doctors and medical sexism and all of this in the most sharp and gorgeous language. 

The book follows a trajectory of sorts. The first part is about Chatti discovering she’s sick, her intense periods, her struggles with not being able to get pregnant even though she is young and doesn’t want to. The second part is about her cancer treatment and the way men ignore her pain. One of the last poems is a long poem called "Awrah" which is an incredible poem about womanhood, about being a Muslim woman, about God and Mary in the Quran and the way’s women’s bodies have been discarded and violated. It is about being empty, about the tension between Mary as vessel and the speaker's own body, a vessel for cancer, and her reckoning with all of that. 

It’s hard to describe how powerful this poem is. It feels so vast. There's anger and pain but also defiance and pride and knowledge, her stepping into this lineage of woman who have been shunned and silenced but speak anyway, live anyway, love anyway. And all the stuff about God is so heartbreaking and vital, the way she is trying to reason with the way women, really Mary, is addressed by God, used by God. She turns Mary into this incredible character who feels so real, and she uses that to think about how women are used for their bodies, how women have been seen only as skin, only a means to an end.

There is so much blood in this collection, it is so bodily. I am going to write about my body but I am not going to give my body away, she seems to be saying. I am going to tell you the bloody truth, she says, and you will listen. 

The last poem, "Deluge", is a prose poem cento with sentences from 30 or more poets and it is incredible, so artful, I almost couldn’t breathe while reading it. It is about death and God and language and being forsaken and seeing seeking seeking a home—in self, in body, in religion. How do you find that home? Chatti uses all these other poet's words to tell this story, to talk about this flood of longing and loss and seeking. The "Awrah" poem is also full of references to the Quran and tons of other writers. These references make the book feel like a flood, the whole book is so packed, it is maximalist in some ways because it is so full of words, and yet the poems are often sparse, restrained, the images cut and clear and gorgeous. 

It almost feels like the book is both a deluge and a purge, like with these thick dripping poems about bodily pain and female pain and religious pain she is emptying herself out and building something new in the floodwaters. It is gorgeous. 

I just really cannot express how much I do not care about a book that is over 70% white men. Get a grip. If your book about artists is not AT LEAST 50% BIPOC and women artists, what the fuck are you doing? I mean for real? What planet are you living on? Get a grip.

Really can't explain what reading Mary Oliver's debut did to me. Most of the poems are so dry and stuffy and forgettable. The book will live in my heart forever. A gift.

Very bleak. Incredible structure. I think I loved it.

This was fascinating. Really enjoyed.

Nothing really happens in this book, and sometimes that doesn't work for me but wow I loved it. It's a really beautiful book about the texture of life, I think, the dailiness of it, even in the middle of turmoil. Loved.

I really appreciated this book. It's about continuing. It's about showing up after you mess up. I can see how it won't be for everyone, but I dug the way Kern wrote a flawed protagonist who never becomes a hero at all, who just keeps going.

Really enjoyed this. The way she writes about poetry is brilliant. Sharp and wise and curious and mysterious and earnest and searching.

Not a style of poetry that works for me.
Very statement-heavy. Does not make me feel any kind of language-joy.
This kind of poetry is for some people though, so it might be for you!

So sharp.
Not for me.
Did not care about these people or find them interesting.
I am just not in the mood for books that aren't earnest.