ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was published by Trio House Press in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com..
Micro-Review of Measurement of Holy by Nadra Mabrouk
Measurement of Holy
by Nadra Mabrouk
APBF & Akashic Books, 2020
Nadra Mabrouk’s Measurement of Holy is one of twelve titles from Akashic Books’ New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Saba), edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. In this perceptive, expertly crafted chapbook, Mabrouk writes about distance and diaspora, longing and prayer, myth and prophecy, the body “desperate for memory,” and a wound “clothed / in a faithful hum / to make its worth and weight / some small measurement of holy.” She gifts us with both soft and searing images, and the active presence of the speaker who conveys a world deeply felt and measured out. Her poems capture the distance between Egypt, where Mabrouk was born, and the United States — and speak to the distance and fragmentation between childhood and adulthood. We accompany the speaker as they stop praying for two years: “I said I don’t understand silence, // and I am always looking for a familiar face, how your chest flutters seraphic, yet / still terrene and unforgiving.” In “Portrait of the Country in Which I Was Born,” the speaker takes a moment to console us: “Here is a knife, I will be quicker this time. I will even sing you a song.” To read Mabrouk’s work is to feel everything, and to celebrate the power of imagery and lyricism simultaneously — she writes of whale song, silences, “whittled roundedness,” a tub of snow, burning fingers, “a moth withering on the tongue,” a bloodied wing, and “the raw syrup / of a small existence;” neither grief nor awe are restrained. In the final poem, “The Prophecy,” the speaker addresses us directly: “I told you what we needed, told you we would never forget,” and this chapbook does the same — it reminds us of what we must hold close no matter what. In this final moment, we can recall the hopeful instruction given to us at the end of “The Condition,” the poem that opens the chapbook: “If there is a seed / in your palm, / you must bend to the soil / and plant it.”
Visit Nadra Mabrouk's Website
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Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
