64
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
historical figures from the seventeenth century to the present day. Moore additionally notes multiple comparisons to Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sharon Olds. Thus, the reader begins the collection with an already saturated sense of Ocasio’s identity as a poet: on the one hand, she writes an embodiment of past lives; on the other, she writes in a way that is comparable to other poetic giants of her lifetime. So, the question remains for the reader: where is Ocasio’s voice in all of this? It may seem as if Ocasio’s voice as poet becomes lost among the more well-known figures and reminiscences of others. Like Tina Barr, Ocasio is at times performing a type of distortion or even inversion, for, in her embodiment of other figures as subjects and her nudges to other poets, the readers of Ocasio’s work get a very real sense of self. Immediately worth discussing is the quartet of Kwansabas that Ocasio includes in section four of her collection: “The Wright Origins,” “Deposition,” “This is The News,” and “Emmett Till Before His Eclipse.” These four poems read as mirrored pairs of one another, as Ocasio embodies the figures of both Richard Wright and Emmett Till. The patterned structure, seven lines of seven words and no more than seven letters per word, creates a conversation between the paired poems of Wright and Till, a suggestion of what Wright (in Paris at the time) may have felt or could have said as he watched the coverage of Till’s funeral and the ensuing trial. The poems resonate in the way that the subject matter still very much resonated then, and resonates now. The embodiment through language of these persons, as well as the poem’s formalism, create this relationship between poem and reader. Ocasio’s embodiment of historical women provides the opportunity for many of the women selected to regain power, even if it is just linguistically. In “Matoaka, One Who Kindles (Also Known as Pocahontas),” the following lines appear: I, a woman warrior for my people, slap treaties from your hand. . . . How I wish I had taunted you, disemboweled your vowels skinned your consonants, cast your words away, syllable by putrid syllable, shoved them
into firewood, stirred them until they exploded into flame.
This empowered action contrasts immensely with “Walking Sepia (for Michelle Obama)” and even “Alondra De La Parra.” In the latter two poems, both women are embodied as purely physical: Michelle Obama “swirls” while de la Parra “undulates.” Ocasio deftly highlights the difference or lack thereof between the two generations of women. At first glance, it would seem that Matoaka possesses more agency than Michelle Obama and Alondra de la Parra. However, Ocasio gives Matoaka the power through the form of the poem. Without this, Matoaka faces the same experience that women in the contemporary era still face, a focus on their external and physicality rather than their interiority. Through embodiment, we see the true reality of identity. Like Barr, Ocasio additionally plays with juxtaposition, and her most powerful poems besides those already mentioned are the ones that suggest something different from what they present. “John F. Kennedy Jr.” and “the Lost Boys of Sudan” pose the question of truth and experience, as both poems are narrated from the outsider’s point of view. Outside looking in, how much can we ever really know about a subject: “Take, for instance, / the photo / of you / kneeling” and “After I read about you in Life / I pictured your frown.” Ocasio’s closing poem, “Deeper Than Skin” comments, “Ellison wrote of an invisible / man. I write the world as colorless as ether.” The work that Ocasio does in this collection, the work of embodying those who were powerless, all while highlighting the lack of power still felt by contemporaries, connects her to Barr in that she also creates a relationship between the local and the global. Ocasio inverts this idea – using time and geographical setting, or even the notion of disconnectedness of the subject – to highlight the actual closeness the subjects of her poems have to those who read them. To understand “Matoaka” is to understand the plight of women and men who are unable to speak fully today. Both poets ask of their readers that they critically assess their own ways of seeing and interpreting the world that exists outside their locality. n
GRACE C. OCASIO received her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Charlotte, NC, with her husband and daughter. Her poetry has also appeared in Rattle, Earth’s Daughters, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Obsidian, and Broad River Review. In 2010 and 2013, she was a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry. In 2011, she won the Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka Prize in Poetry. She was a James Applewhite Poetry Prize finalist in 2012 for her poem “Little Girlfriend” (published in NCLR 2013) and in 2014 for her poem “After Perusing Grandma’s Scrapbook” (published in NCLR Online 2015). And in 2014, she was a recipient of a Regional Artist Project Grant Award funded by the North Carolina Arts Council.