“you have two choices: / to believe nothing / or everything I tell you,” says Omotara James in her poem, “Rufus, I never met you, but I want to tell you,” from her debut collection, Song Of My Softening, forthcoming from Alice James Books. And this is the essential message of the collection—faith in James, who spits out truths like they are dime a dozen, a kind of linguistic currency that delights and terrifies. Writing about the body, grief, lust, beauty, queer joy, Blackness and death, sometimes in the same breath, James has created a powerful collection, one that spans generations while remaining timely, spectacular, and new. It’s easy to believe what James tells the reader, and although she is offering us a choice, there is really no choice at all—from page one, we are wrapped up in her poetic fantasy, on a journey completely unlike many other emerging authors.
“No one gives a damn about a poem / until they need a poem…My mother is a poem. / Women are poems. / Black women are poems,” says James in “On Repetition,” an early poem in the collection. She frequently mentions the process of writing in, noting the permeable, flexible nature of poetry. She has taken the form and made it into a living, breathing practice—an extension of the body itself. Poetry, for James, is more than words on the page. It is the way she thinks, moves, lives. So much of this collection is physical, and we see this in the writing as well as in the subject matter. Invented or conjoined words like “bruisegrip,” and “heavyplump,” which appear throughout the writing, show James’ desire to create a new kind of language—a kind of slangy, invented speech that mixes the tongues of her ancestors—Nigerian and Trinidadian—with her more elevated, traditionally MFA poetic diction. The question of what a poem inherently is may be something that James is playing with throughout this collection, both in the language she uses and the subject matter she engages with, but the result is a simultaneously playful and deeply moving set of works.
As for the physical aspect of the work, James consistently brings up the body, fatness, and beauty in her poems. Early in the second section of the book, she writes in, “A Mother Can See More Sitting Down Than A Child Standing Up”:
My mother looks at me as I am no witness to myself
the summer before college, eighteen, when she states
in the mirror, that no man will ever love me
at this weight. The tears I don’t cry
(then) mean I am not too weak
to receive such honesty.
Maybe she is more right
than we dare
to see.
This is a deeply painful moment, and perhaps one that many assigned-female-at-birth people can relate to, but James handles it with grace. Throughout the collection, she references fatness as both a gift and a curse—a chance for immense beauty and celebration and also something that has literally weighed her down as she moves through the world. What is so exciting about this collection is that even in these difficult moments, James remains sly, witty, and self-aware. Her speaker does not pass judgment on her family—nor does she dwell on the deep wound of this moment. Rather, she allows the reader to draw their own conclusions, and in other instances, we see fat, Black, queer joy—James’ pushback against a world that has tried so hard to push her down and failed.
Queer joy permeates this collection—even as James shows us the more complex issues that come with being female, Black, queer, and fat, such as her coming out to her mother. One of the most affecting passages in the collection is when James’ speaker tells us that during her first lesbian sexual encounter, she had to stop in the middle, because of the consensuality of the encounter and the intensity of that agreement. James states:
…With my first lesbian lover, I was so overwhelmed by what I had said yes to, by the consensuality of it, that I stopped in the middle, put on my clothes and needed a break. She asked if I was joking, as I exited the bedroom, leaving my desire in the other room…
This moment of joy is wonderfully brilliant in a collection which is so full of grief, and provides a genuine contrast from some of the darker themes.
Grief comes through deeply in this debut. One of the poems that stands out is “More”:
Out here,
even the air burns from the
near miss. Even the moon
needs a cool sip before
illuminating the evening. I
hardly ever have a partner
when I go walking—oh,
how your nearness
incites the grieving.
James is a master of writing about grief, as well as code-switching. She seamlessly moves from a conversational, even confrontational tone to a highly elevated, poetic diction which you might find in the most academic of texts. But it is this juxtaposition that makes her writing so enjoyable to read—it brings a seriousness as well as irony to her writing about grief that makes it even easier to connect to—grief is a complicated, messy emotion, and James is a complicated writer. She is not easily classifiable, and neither is her writing, and this makes her even more interesting, engaging, and new.
“when I die / I want my poems to die too,” writes James in “Ode to Extinction.” It’s impossible to imagine James’ poems dying out; her voice is so bright and irrepressible. It’s also impossible to imagine this collection as being about softening—it is a siren song, a brilliant, harsh indictment of the way we communicate ideas about the body, sex, and womanhood to our young girls, and how we grow up into the women we are, as queer women of color. And even more than that, it is a poet’s handbook, viciously interrogating what makes a poem, and how to expand and contract the poem’s form into something useful and even something revolutionary. Finally, Song Of My Softening is a sharp, beautifully-wrought collection of poems, as well as a tool for grieving, a personal diary of loss.
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