New York Times Delves Into Books That Explore Grief, Mental Illness, Marginalization

Emilia Phillips guides readers through four new collections of poetry by Carmen Giménez Smith, Shira Erlichman, Prageeta Sharma, and Jake Skeets. Beginning with Smith's Be Recorder, Phillips writes that "[w]hile taking on gentrification and border walls, white feminism and late capitalism, Giménez Smith manages to frame a queer, Latinx, immigrants’ daughter, motherhood poetics that’s entirely her own." More from there: 

“Ars Poetica,” a poem about writing poetry, is a series of “I” statements, admissions and identifications that position selfhood, one’s identity, as inseparable from one’s poetry. Giménez Smith insists that no one (especially women and others disenfranchised by our culture) should apologize for this. “I want to recommend that we stop apologizing,” she writes early on. “Personally, / when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into/ a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love.”

ODES TO LITHIUM

Poems

By Shira Erlichman

87 pp. Alice James. Paper, $17.95.

“It’s because of you / something heavy should fly,” Erlichman writes in one of her debut collection’s many addresses to lithium, a medication prescribed to treat bipolar disorder. Through her nonlinear narrative of hospitalization, treatment and everyday life, Erlichman turns a confessional self-portrait of crisis into a chemical, chimerical joyride toward self-acceptance. One speaker takes a bath with the musician Björk; another lets Phineas Gage, the 19th-century railroad foreman who survived an iron rod driven through his frontal lobe, crash on her couch. Beyond these more fantastical poems, however, the speaker, self-identified as “one of many puzzlebodies,” negotiates the culture of the “hospitaljail” and, after her release, navigates her changed relationships with friends, family and lovers. At times she encounters bias or insensitivity, revealing just how much Western culture stigmatizes mental illness, as with the friend who says “but / you / don’t / seem /like / you / have / Bipolar” or the “pharmacist at the pickup counter” who “whispered, ‘The lithium?’” [...]

Read on at NYT.