Please make me pretty, I don't want to die
Poems
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Publisher Description
The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry
Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor.
The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring—one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: “The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Organized around the four seasons, the poems in Mulalu's sensory and exciting debut combine surprising, even wry insights ("Afro's gone Medusa again.// Every coil's its own Hydra./ I'm adventuring with a comb") with powerful confessions ("Every day I find myself/ smaller with effort"). In "Argo, My Argo," which opens the collection's "Summer" section, the inanimate envies the animate, "Being alive must be nice,/ says the sink basin, filling// further with myths," complicating and layering Mulalu's investigation of diasporic Black African identity in America. Mulalu invokes other poets, especially Sylvia Plath (in "Aria" and "Frenzy"), for whom "it will only make me feel/ more real to know the pain of your mind." Other poems allude to Brahms and van Gogh, whose ear is described as "lying now without Zyrtec in a field/ abstracted here into this concerto for a single voice," but the allusions never overpower Mulalu's own vision and originality. These inventive, lyrical, and well-crafted poems offer memorable insights at every turn.
