The Black Maria

Starred review from March 21, 2016
Girmay (Kingdom Animalia), winner of a 2015 Whiting Award, crafts a moving collection of lyrical, image-thick poems that balance on the knife edge separating vulnerability and unapologetic strength. The lives of Eritrean refugees and immigrants serve as the collection’s thematic foundation, though Girmay also thoughtfully dissects and examines blights of America’s current sociopolitical climate, particularly police brutality and the murders of such young black women and men as Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell. The ideas of diaspora, alienation, and separation—whether borne by the devastating legacies of slavery or the heartbreaking necessities of political asylum—are viewed as the repetitious and stubborn waves of history: “memory has long skin, it counts// the invasions, the factories & ports & rails.” However, these ideas are never treated as the heritage or sole narrative of particular peoples, but rather an indictment of colonialism and nationalism. In “Prayer & Letter to the Dead,” the sea operates as a metaphor for lives squandered and lost under the banner of imperialism. Girmay’s ruminations on King Leopold I of Belgium address the devastation he inflicted upon the Belgian Congo and its people, further revealing how racism is not a series of discrete incidents, but a pervasive web of relations. Girmay effortlessly slips between collective history and personal memory, tackling the subject of black pain without victimizing herself or exploiting the voices of the marginalized.

Starred review from April 1, 2016

Whiting Award winner Girmay (Kingdom Animalia) recalls the larger African diaspora as she commemorates the more than 20,000 people who have died sailing from North Africa to Europe in a bid for a better life: "our passages/ above which, again, / we are the shipped." Using bold, sharply lyric language, she addresses the drowned as "you," encircling them in community and giving them a humanity and individuality death statistics belie. The sea--and, by extension, all water--of course figures largely here ("the fishermen drop their veils// into your grave"), with the title referencing the black patches on the moon initially mistaken as seas (mare in Latin). As Girmay clarifies in the title poem, being thus "mis-seen" defines life for people of color, with the very act of naming an estrangement she explores further in daring, divergent poems. VERDICT Beautiful, brilliant, and palpably angry; an important book all readers can appreciate. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2016
Lunar maria, dark, basaltic plains on the moon's surface, take their name from the Latin word for seas, identified as such by mistaken astronomers. This fascinating confusion fuels Girmay's (Kingdom Animalia, 2011) third poetry collection, which co-opts the sailing-obsessed tales of Odysseus, adopts African slave Abram Gannibal, ancestor of renowned Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and testifies on behalf of the wrongfully accused Black Panther George Jackson, among many others. The opening poems move fluidly from opalescent jellyfish ( Systolic & Slow, go / the long-legged / hauling of the agonies ) to lavish Venetian iconology ( a world crowned by pomegranates in damask / & identical angels wearing socks ). The second half of the book presents a jarring series of estrangements: In Chicago, my mother's hometown, / the death toll climbs like a serpent up the red graph. The pairing is astoundingly effective, and this bright, ambitious work deserves several rereadings. A self-described inheritor of Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African American traditions, Girmay is a dazzling, wildly dynamic poet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)