{"id":7560,"date":"2016-07-14T08:00:32","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T15:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=7560"},"modified":"2016-07-14T14:40:11","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T21:40:11","slug":"editors-corner-july-summer-reads-and-the-poetics-of-reckoning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/14\/editors-corner-july-summer-reads-and-the-poetics-of-reckoning\/","title":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s Corner: July Summer Reads and the Poetics of Reckoning"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mohabir_Liu_July2016Feature\"<\/a>
Debut collections from two LR contributors: Rajiv Mohabir’s THE TAXIDERMIST’S CUT and Kenji C. Liu’s MAP OF AN ONION.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This month, our Summer Reads include Rajiv Mohabir\u2019s The Taxidermist\u2019s Cut<\/a> <\/em>(Four Way Books, 2016) <\/strong>and Kenji C. Liu\u2019s Map of an Onion<\/a><\/em> (Inlandia Books, 2016)<\/strong>, two remarkable debut collections that feel so fully conceived, so urgently and articulately expressed, that one hesitates to call them \u201cdebuts,\u201d as these are clearly two poets who have been at this for longer than the term \u201cfirst book\u201d implies. Deeply theorized, expertly crafted, and placed squarely in conversation with the poets\u2019 respective family histories, cultures, and discourses of science and post-colonialism, these works draw the reader into a thoroughgoing investigation of what it means to be human, delivered into a specific time, body, and cultural milieu. These poems are the maps they have fashioned for themselves, forging a poetics of reckoning in pursuit of generational and lived truth.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>In The Taxidermist\u2019s Cut<\/em><\/strong>, Rajiv Mohabir\u2019s lines, both sinister and lovely, function as cuts that reveal and divide, shimmering with the erotics of violence. Transfixed, one finds oneself unable to look away, arrested by the elegance of the language and the way, when held to the skin, it causes the body to shiver with pleasure. The line, the body, the text, the means by which bodies make and destroy themselves; \u201cPick up the razor. \/\/ It sounds like erasure<\/em>.\u201d Formally, the couplet features prominently throughout, raising the question of what\u2019s joined, what\u2019s split, what adheres together and what pulls apart. Stitched through with found text from Practical Taxidermy<\/em>, The Complete Tracker<\/em>, and other taxidermy-related manuals, the poems confront the body with a mixture of scientific detachment and intimacy, as the life of the body\u2014its homoerotic desire, its violation\u2014is rendered in acute detail. Members of Mohabir\u2019s family, past and present, drift in and out of The Taxidermist\u2019s Cut<\/em>, as, marked by a pilgrim poetics of wandering, the book moves through the West Indies, the South, boroughs of New York City, reckoning with memory, desire, and histories of conquest and slavery. These poems are breath caught from the throat, blood cut from a wound\u2014the cry that follows, in pleasure, in pain, indistinguishable from song.<\/p>\n

Kenji C. Liu\u2019s Map of an Onion<\/em><\/strong>, a work deeply textured by memory and place, maps its own set of explorations beyond and within cartographies of language, national borders, and the body. Like Mohabir\u2019s, Liu\u2019s subjectivity is shaped by multiple histories and homelands, all impressed upon a poet who writes with deep sensitivity to the pre-colonial realities of place, drawing us into greater awareness of what it means to be American, immigrants, humans. \u201cGhost maps are hungry maps,\u201d he writes, tracing lineages and interlocking histories through time. It’s a mapmaking of the self, a \u201csearch translated between my family\u2019s four languages.\u201d Marked in places by profound longing (\u201cHome is on no map, and explorers \/ will never find it. That time has passed\u201d) the poems, in their searching, take us from Mars to Moscow, suburban New Jersey to the World War II Philippine jungle. The book itself, neatly sized and beautifully produced, fits compactly in the reader\u2019s hand and brings to the body an awareness of itself as a artifact translated across cultures, yet possessing a language all its own. Map of an Onion, <\/em>too, concerns itself with the act of incision, especially of paper, \u201cthe surgery of documents\u201d cutting ruthlessly\u00a0across land, sea, and families. What binds and what breaks\u2014folded, torn. \u201cTaste your own \/ luscious \/\/ fissures,\u201d the poet says, the places where selves meet; the sinew, cartilage, and tendon of bodies that are bound and, simultaneously, transcendent.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

What books are on your summer reading list? We\u2019d love to hear about them! Leave us a comment below or share your best recommendations with us on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>,\u00a0Facebook<\/a>, or Instagram<\/a>\u00a0(@LanternReview).<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month, our Summer Reads include Rajiv Mohabir\u2019s The Taxidermist\u2019s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016) and Kenji C. Liu\u2019s Map of an Onion (Inlandia Books, 2016), two remarkable debut collections that feel so fully conceived, so urgently and articulately expressed, that one hesitates to call them \u201cdebuts,\u201d as these are clearly two poets who have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[902],"tags":[161,136,620,1092,475,524,1053,1091],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7560"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7568,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7560\/revisions\/7568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}