What He Did in Solitary

September 1, 2020

Accomplished poet/novelist Majmudar (Dothead) writes with the observational precision one would expect of the diagnostic nuclear radiologist he is. His explorations here are multilayered. First, he considers the self in solitude: "I have lived out my life/ seeking a self/ in no one else's image," he says at one point, while making the imaginative leap to a prisoner in solitary: "Drawing sustenance, drawing from the well, drawing his family like a treasure map from memory." Second, he writes about our everyday grappling with the world, from the everyday--"Tonight, love, let's rush to the trilling dryer/ and scoop our strange new clothes in our arms"--to the shocking story of a bully turned victim. Third, he articulates the experience of coming of age as a Brown boy in America, where he was born. Yet "English is my native/ anguish," he's got to worry about looking like bomber Ahmad Rahami, and a meditation on invasive species explains how newcomers "make themselves at home and home/ remakes them into natives" yet is suffused with a perpetual outsider feeling. VERDICT Well-conceived, well-crafted work for most collections.

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