Exiles of Eden

May 20, 2019
Contesting the idealism of Eden while summoning Eve as her muse, Osman (The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony) dissects displacement, most notably as a woman and a Somali-American. She addresses ancestral sorrow, privilege, and self-neglect as well as the feeling of waning hope. Fueled by the fatigue of pain, the speaker finds renewed strength as she exposes her vulnerability. She admits to being “reckless about making a display” of her unhappiness and considers the source of her pain: “The sea fell on my house/ and I couldn’t tell if it jumped on me/ or me in it.” She acknowledges identity as a conception “in a great mirror/ of your own construction” and embraces the humor of life’s tedious combat: “I kill yet another moth,/ and consider leaving its body,/ marker for cousins eating uneven holes/ in the blooms of my favorite shawl.” These poems, both surreal and domestic, transform the vocabulary of nature into an emotional discourse: “An algorithm reduces me to one sentence:/ I am such a long day”; “I try to remember half-lives...// Exponential death, exponential halving of a life.” On occasion, her metaphors are unnecessarily indirect, diluting her work. The book as a whole, however, offers a generous, rooted, and humbly adamant quest for agency.