Femme in public alok vaid menon5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() The final quartet - “impossible lives,” “your wound is my garden,” “our tremendous beauty,” and “care is our natural state” - simultaneously brought me to tears AND had me exclaiming aloud in affirmation. Some poems were especially powerful standouts. The collection picked up steam as it went, with the home stretch packing in a crescendo of particularly magnificent poems. ![]() Are we really to believe that people weren’t already lonely before being trapped indoors? Were we not beset by countless other epidemics (violence against trans and non-binary people, for instance) back when things were deemed “comfortable” and “normal”? Are we not still laden with griefs that precede the stasis induced by the pandemic? The poems question and probe this line and range in tone from mourning to euphoria, from ridicule to self-regard. But in the arrangement of the poems, Alok - a master of challenging binaries - seems perhaps to challenge whether the experiences of the pandemic can be so cleanly delineated into a “before and after” framework. ![]() The collection as a whole straddles the “before and after” divide of the COVID-19 pandemic, some written before it began, and others noted to have been written after. This collection reveals new dimensions to the same courage, perception, defiance, and deep care that first drew me to Alok. That chapbook fundamentally changed the way that I see - and move through - the world. I have been on the edge of my seat waiting for Alok Vaid-Menon to publish more poetry since their 2017 debut, Femme in Public. ![]()
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