Blood of the Air by Ama Codjoe
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Don’t let the small package of this collection fool you. It is more than a chapbook. Every poetry teacher has a few secret weapons, and this powerhouse of a collection has become one of mine. The poems never fail to stun. My students are mostly women, and Codjoe, who is not only a master of craft, but a master storyteller, writes about women’s erasure, sexual violence, grief, and perseverance. She brings voice to women whose voices we have not heard, and in doing so, invites other women to tell their stories.
In the opening poem, “Burying Seeds,” Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X, is pregnant with twin girls at the time of the murder. Codjoe writes that she says:
…Well, it finally
happened. Weeks prior, she had taken to wearingher husband’s hat for comfort and continued to do so
after he died. I want a desire that could be mistaken
for grief to cloud my face, to make me shudder, to twistmy mouth into a cry.
The unflinching gaze at the inevitability of loss underscores the bravery of women. In the poem “She Said,” quoted language in the poem is from the written testimony from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in 2018 and from a rape trial from 1612. Codjoe allows us to hear the vulnerability and power in these women’s words. Codjoe closes the collection with “Le sacre du printemps” (after Pina Bausch), a dance about a sacrificial victim who, of course, is a girl. She writes:
I am restless. Tonight, I remember
I vowed to feel as alive as the woman who—
in a rite of spring—must dance herselfto death. Hair frazzled, clothes soiled, the fated
woman fell to the earth then sprang back up,slashing the air and contracting her body as if
she’d been punched repeatedly.
The title poem is a revisitation of the Greek myth of Leda and Zeus. Each line is numbered, a fourteen-line sonnet with the volta, “10. According to the common legend Zeus visited Leda in the disguise of a swan, and she / 11. produced two eggs…” The simple language and syntax underscore the sexual violence in a way that is devastating and completely slant.
Codjoe’s use of craft deserves attention. She often uses form such as couplets, tercets, or space on the page masterfully to attune the reader’s attention. In the poem “Burying Seeds,” as I tell my students, notice the musicality, how the poem riffs on pentameter, the effectiveness of the use of a question in the middle of the poem:
My mother did not wear a veil on her wedding day.
Eighteen years after their divorce, my father
fidgets with the gold band she slid along his finger.As she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger,
shimmying the ring over my father’s knuckle,
which words did her mind circle over: worse or betterdeath or death? That night, did my mother bunch
the hotel bedsheet in one hand like a nosegay?
In “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” another stunner, she uses end stops, anaphora, and layering of images for a breathless effect. “Gonna bloody the head of every god, ghost, or swan who has torn into me—pried me open with its beak,” she writes. “Gonna mend my annihilations into a white picket fence.” Indeed. These are stories of blood and violence, but ultimately perseverance.
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Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. She is a Hedgebrook and Mineral School fellow and the founder of Fishplate Poetry. Her work can be found at JAMA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Parabola, and many others.