Articles

Lilith works at night. Penance, some would say, for her alleged crimes. It’s true that people have loved to wag a finger in her face. She’s been accused of terrible things. You wouldn’t know it, here, with the soft song of a lullaby on her tongue, the rhythm of the monitors in the background.

The poem “Okandja Irogo” is part of a larger manuscript called “Cabinda”. It is a work that is influenced by the history of Angola and Cabinda from the Portuguese colonial era to the modern day. This poem was born out of an eternal feeling of loss and of belonging to a mix of the main subgroups who live in Cabinda, the Vili, Sundi, Yombe, Kakongo, Woyo and the Linge. I am part of the so-called diaspora but I am fully aware of where I come from.

by Allie Spikes I shave my head on my friend’s sultry Texas porch. Swollen West Nile mosquitos   hang in the whir of falling strawberry locks. My reflection bends, my new jaw softer   than I want. The blue of my skin glares too pink underneath, like baby mice freckled by chicken   pox and scorn. …

by Jai Dulani twisted roots stretched out towards each other Parvati, my mother’s mother jawed Sindhi. her daughter, refugee camp Punjabi. matrilineal severed bark.   I spoke English to my mother’s Hindi   not everything makes it upstream   we’re from pre-partition Pakistan. blood-dripped alliteration we background each other casual.   my 2nd generation despair, a …

I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss anything about orthodoxy; it mapped a path for me that led across mountain ridges with lush vistas. Poetry has become a kind of surrogate for orthodoxy, except instead of one beaten path to the peak, there are manifold deer trails, switchbacks, creek beds. Swards of green to ford.  

Perhaps one of the most resounding themes in Newman’s collection of poems is the idea of home. Utilizing a mixture of Yiddish and English, Newman pinpoints that she herself struggles with the meaning of home.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid but really studying, writing, and thinking about it since I was an undergraduate in the 90s. As a writer and person, I love Adrienne Rich’s idea that truth is “an increasing complexity,” and I’m very interested in layering histories, untold stories, disparate stories and references, and complex feelings in my work. I hope my writing works against our sound-bite culture and drive to simplify.

My poems are often obsessed with the intersection of small, personal histories with large-scale, national histories. I write about cruelty and violence, the question of how we represent trauma on the page.

I’ve been writing more seriously for almost seven years, and starting down that path felt like an event. My daughter was two at the time, and becoming a parent felt like it had reorganized every cell in my body. Rediscovering writing was part of getting back to feeling fully human.

Skin Memory is a delightful collection that is equal parts comfort and unsettling, purposeful and powerful in its moves. Sibley Williams lingers in each poem just long enough to paint a portrait of what living in a changing world looks and feels like…