MAPMAKER REVISITED
By Beatriz Badikian
Gladsome Books, 83 pages, $10.95
SOUTHSIDE RAIN
By Quraysh Ali Lansana
Third World Press, 68 pages, $10
WHERE THE ENDING BEGINS
By J.M. Morea
Nappyhead Press, 46 pages, $5
Migration is a “radical and tragic form of travel,” Chicagoan Beatriz Badikian writes in her fourth book of poetry, “Mapmaker Revisited.” A native of Buenos Aires, Badikian portrays her current home with a mixture of irony, surprise and affection. In “A Week’s Worth of Poems,” she describes the “painful Chicago wind” and the way a man one night in January stopped the poem’s speaker and said, “I love/your long black hair and big brown eyes,/won’t you come with me and dance?”
In this insightful collection, Badikian examines cultural cliches and considers immigrant life from opposing perspectives. In “Teaching English as a Second Language,” an instructor ponders her students’ questions about the differences between Spanish and English, then, while they work, reads literary theory by Derrida and De Man and is puzzled herself.
Though the tones of the different sections of “Mapmaker Revisited” don’t always cohere, they do suggest the variety of the poet’s experiences and her attempts to connect the competing backdrops of her life and imagination.
Quraysh Ali Lansana also takes us on a tour of Chicago in “Southside Rain,” but without the allusions to Argentina and Europe. His landscape is the South Side–a diner at 63rd and Cottage Grove, the tracks at 71st and Dorchester. The scenes he witnesses show weary workers, displaced figures and the unjustly accused (one poem, “Our Sons,” is dedicated to “the seven and eight year old boys wrongly accused in the murder of eleven year old ryan harris”).
Some of Lansana’s poems state a political message too quickly without letting it arise from the ample images and scenes, such as “Name Calling,” “a poem about female genital mutilation.” Here he doesn’t allow his poetry the chance to demonstrate his message. But most of the poems are energetic and playfully sly. “Fat-free” begins: “pacific northwest caucasian cats/purr suburban tones/from ivory mountaintops.”
The quest is more interior in J.M. Morea’s book of poetry, “Where the Ending Begins” (available at Women & Children First, Brent Books and Cards), a contemplation of the speakers’ finding a comfortable place within themselves. The most powerful poem, “Collage in E Minor,” blends sensual description into a fast-paced narrative of wandering–“licorice, rocksalt, and salmon/fever in your hand, moonlight in reverse/giving me away in loon skin mittens. . . .” After a 39-line question, which admirably never stutters, the speaker breaks and says, “Again, I am running across that cemetery,/winter, young girl without a coat.”
Morea’s best poems read like sensual lists, heaped with garlands of images to be savored even before the reader quite knows the situation or conceit of the poem. The less impressive poems in the collection are leaner, and enigmatic where they might remind a reader of authentic, universal emotions. But the first-person speakers Morea uses frequently are not presumptuous; rather, they strike an earnest note and present their conflicts and hopes with a sometimes naive, but always appealing, candor.
