Book Review: Wager by Adele Elise Williams

By: Annaliese Kunst

Wager is former Cream City Review contributor Adele Elise Williams’ debut poetry book—as well as the finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, in which the judge Patricia Smith described it as “crafted to upend the familiar.” This poetry collection explores how trauma fundamentally changes you and the harsh realities of an idealized Americana with meticulous wit and technique. 

As soon as you start reading Wager, Williams shocks and challenges the readers in a seemingly simple poem titled “Deconstructing Milk Baby” that grows more complex the deeper you look. The poem explores Williams’ life in a simplified, broken-down formula, using repetition of “and before that” to mimic the cyclical nature of life. The strongest part of this piece is when Williams showcases how everything that happens to us—from birth to death—changes who we are: 

“I was a floor baby / but not a bed baby / so my head / is round-round / like an acorn, / like a bumble / that bothered, left / and then returned. / Full circle. Full of resentment. / I am full of resentment / and fear. / I am a fearful woman.” 

Williams returns once more to playing with time and childhood anxieties in “Earliest-Memory Prompt.” The use of enjambment within this poem forces the reader to keep reading and reading at a quick pace, just how these images flash through the speaker’s mind when she recalls her childhood. Additionally, the speed and pace at which she guides you through the poem leads you to gut-wrenching, subtly confronting lines. Flashes of tense childhood memories scar and leave an imprint on you, yet as Williams showcases here, are just another snapshot within your mind. The poem ends on a shocking note that perfectly displays how traumatic memories as a young child shape you:  

“the heavy buckle snapping like cherry the dropping / like pop, no, it is like how at the deepest moment / of fucking i wanna die.”  

The poem, “God Bless Americana,” details how the very core of Americana is brutalized violence while also portraying the inequalities between social classes within this culture. Yet, there is a clash between the speaker and blue-collar culture when it comes to roadkill and violence. The word choice of this poem is terrific, consistently using words associated with death and gore to immerse us into the rural South setting, while also juxtaposing it alongside mentions of Santa and G.I. Jane to showcase the clash between the speaker and this culture of violence. The combination of violence and childlike imagery is what really sells the poem: 

“and after the neighbor shut her / door I ran to the beg, my hatchet at the ready, gripped cautiously / like a child’s hand while street crossing and when I opened / the trashed bag there was nothing inside but blood, blood.”  

In “Take the Bait” Williams explores how harsh realities of her childhood still persist within her. She details rescuing animals and trying to help them, but always ended up slowly watching them die. This cycle led to morbid curiosity and obsession, which later leaked into other aspects of her life, such as writing poetry. The violence of roadkill and animals being hunted and consumed is examined and paralleled alongside fruit imagery and innocence, perfectly showing Williams’ addictive nature. 

“I remember caring / for the strays under our house… I’d watch them die, always sick / and on the edge… Was my / interest in salvage or ritual?… I remember / the first poem I ever wrote — a clementine / full-faced and gasping as I consumed it / whole, even the juices hollered.” 

It is impossible to easily and quickly summarize Wager in a few words, just as it is impossible to write a review on it and capture all of its themes. Williams is a firecracker and has an expert understanding of pacing, switching from lingering on a graphic image or skipping right past it like it was an everyday image. She keeps readers on their toes and her collection begs you to keep reading until all the poems have been consumed whole. 

Wager is out now to read. Copies are available from University of Arkansas Press. You can order a copy here: https://www.uapress.com/product/wager/ 

Bios:

Annaliese Kunst is an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is majoring in English with a focus in Creative Writing. Previously, she was the Managing Editor of UWM’s undergraduate literary magazine Furrow.

An Interview with Dorsía Smith Silva

By Keinana Shah

What does it truly mean to drown? According to Dorsía Smith Silva, it means more than you would think. Her upcoming debut poetry collection, In Inheritance of Drowning, explores the devastating effects of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, highlighting the natural world, the lasting impact of hurricanes, and the marginalization of Puerto Ricans. These poems also focus on the multiple sites of oppression in the United States, especially the racial, social, and political injustices that occur every day. The book is set to be published by this fall, November 2024. Yet I had the privilege of a sneak preview as well as a chance to talk about Dorsía’s writing process and ideas.

KS: What inspired you to write this anthology of poems?

DSS: I wrote In Inheritance of Drowning because I wanted readers to have a deeper understanding of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is too often depicted by glossy photographs of beaches and sunshine. Readers are probably unaware of the extent of the damage Hurricane María caused in Puerto Rico and that Puerto Rico suffered the longest blackout in U.S. history. It took about eleven months for all of Puerto Rico to have electricity. Over two thousand people died, and several flattened buildings and homes have never been repaired. The response for aid to Puerto Rico was and still is lackluster, so you can imagine the widespread devastation and the emotional, physical, and mental toll on us. The roots of Puerto Rico being under the thumb of colonialism with the U.S. are crushing. Some of the poems in In Inheritance of Drowning also explore the experiences of those that had to leave Puerto Rico after Hurricane María because they became homeless and jobless.

I also wanted to examine oppression in the United States, which was bubbling to the surface with police brutality, Black Lives Matter, immigrants’ rights, toppling of racist monuments, and COVID-19 while I was writing the book. In Inheritance of Drowning enters this conversation of how these moments can drown/undrown disenfranchised communities.

I think the poems In Inheritance of Drowning are essential. We need more BIPOC stories, and we need to tell our own stories that are intersectional and move across disciplines. So, In Inheritance of Drowning, is a story that I want to tell, and I hope readers enjoy it.

KS: Many of the poems are written in a first person narrative, such as “Widow” and “Ghost Talker Poem”. Are any of the poems based on your real life experiences?

DSS: A few of the poems are based on my life. For instance, “Ghost Talker Poem,” is based on a time when I wondered why there was a dearth of media coverage on missing Black and Brown girls. It was very hard for me to understand as a young child why the media would not cover our disappearances, especially when there were so many stories about white women and girls that had disappeared. I wondered, “Weren’t our stories newsworthy too? Why were our cases going untold? Where was our respect and justice?”

“How I Lost My Name” is also based on a personal experience when a teacher didn’t want to call on me because this person thought my first name was “too difficult” to pronounce. I was nervous about being stereotyped as the “difficult black girl” in class and the repercussions of telling the teacher something without being called on, so I politely waited to be called. However, I kept waiting for my turn to speak and I was kept waiting. Some readers may be able to relate to this experience and recognize the tactics to dismantle our identities, keep us silent, and try to make us feel invisible.

KS: In “Widows”, your use of enjambment is significant. What were you trying to convey through this structure? How does it enrich your poem?

DSS: In “Widows,” I wanted the poem to have a certain flow that would encourage readers to continue reading until they reached the end of the poem. I hope the effect creates more tension in the poem and builds a certain momentum and fluidity. The poem has some sprinkles of narrative qualities and colloquial language too, where I can envision the speaker contemplating disaster capitalism, social injustice, and violent hurricanes with others. Overall, I think enjambment emphasizes the important details of the poem and engages the reader in the beauty of the transitions, especially as the poem moves from the color black to FEMA’s irresponsibility, complex physical and emotional damage from Hurricane María, and drowning.

KS: Your book is named after “The Inheritance of Drowning”, why did you decide to name it after that specific poem?

DSS: I knew right away that the title of my debut poetry book would be In Inheritance of Drowning. I love the title because it encapsulates the confrontation of the survival of BIPOC communities and how we are constantly inheriting a world that unfortunately is grim—a world that keeps trying to drown our identities and blame us in the process. The title poem “In Inheritance of Drowning” was originally published in this journal in 2021, and I was beyond thrilled when it was accepted by Cream City Review. The poem delves more into the historical moments of how Black and Brown bodies have been drowned, such as the Taíno and African slaves, and links to our contemporary drowning when the poem asks at the end, “How many ways can we drown?” It is asking, “How many ways do the systems of oppression (try to) kill us?”

KS: There is a recurring theme of drowning throughout the anthology. It serves as the overall focal point. What does the concept of drowning mean to you? In your eyes, is it a physical or physiological burden?

DSS: Someone told me that drowning functions as an extended metaphor throughout the book. I really like this explanation of how drowning links throughout the book. Overall, drowning is a physical and physiological burden. It is what keeps us shrouded in doubt. It weighs us down, so that we never reach our potential. It keeps us from achieving our dreams. It overwhelms us. It robs us of our identities. It rips apart communities and families. It keeps us tied to complex trauma and oppression. You can think of the literal history of how people drowned during The Middle Passage, and how others drowned as victims of police brutality in In Inheritance of Drowning. There is also how certain places like Puerto Rico are drowning in debt because colonial oppressors have exploited them and stripped them of making decisions that would give them autonomy.

KS: A lot of the poems deal with heavy topics such as death, oppression, and trauma (as seen in poems like “Ghost Talker Poem” and ““The Inheritance of Drowning”). I am curious to know what your headspace was like when writing this. What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book and why?

DSS: I have been told that I am very serious as a writer and poet. In keeping with what I think is an accurate description of myself, I wrote in the mindset of creating protest poetry. Therefore, In Inheritance of Drowning is not light verse. I would not be true to myself, if I trivialized the impact of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico. Many people died, and others lost their homes and businesses. Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the U.S. was also strongly enforced, as Puerto Ricans got tired of waiting for aid and started removing debris and trees on their own; people started looking after their own neighborhoods because FEMA’s response vacillated between slow and non-existent. Puerto Rico is still recovering in many ways, and Hurricane María was almost seven years ago. There is also no way for me to address the current state of oppression in the United States without a solemn mindset. The current state of events makes me apprehensive for historically marginalized people. I wonder what the landscape will look like as there have been more barriers—more drowning—for BIPOC communities.

KS: There are many themes of generational trauma and family within your work. Are these themes important to you? How have they shaped your writing?

DSS: Yes, generational trauma and family are very significant themes to me and influence my writing. For example, I have edited and co-edited several texts on mothering and motherhood, including Latina/Chicana Mothering (Demeter Press), and a part of my research on Maternal Studies has been exploring how the trauma that the birth mother carries—this may be done consciously or unconsciously—can impact the child. I write about this cycle of trauma in In Inheritance of Drowning as inherited trauma that is largely due to the sinister legacies of discrimination and oppression. I think many of the poems reflect the harm of generational trauma and how “we wake up drowning.” Of course, there are ways to have something more than a promise of coping and achieve actual healing. I am exploring how these tensions become resolved in some new poems.

KS: What was the process of writing this book?

DSS: Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. We lost electricity a few hours after María struck, and we lost water a few days later. I started keeping a journal as a way to record my feelings and unravel what had happened. I had many questions that had no answers— When would the electricity be restored? When would the birds return? How were others coping? Eventually, I had filled several notebooks, and I revised these initial thoughts/manifestations of the mind into poems.

Then, there were movements like Black Lives Matter, several high-profile cases of police brutality, and the pandemic. I started writing poems that grappled with these topics, and asked more questions, such as where is justice for those that have been historically marginalized and when will society be ready for a social transformation.

When deciding the structure for the book, I knew that I had wanted the poems about Hurricane María to frame the book, and to be the first and third sections. The other poems that focused on the different forms of oppression in the United States would then compromise the second section of the book.

KS: Your poems present a history of colonization, racism, and feminicide, leading to a legacy of “drowning”. You seem to raise questions about generational trauma —and by extension, the inheritance of pain. With all that being said, what would you like readers to take away from this book?

DSS: My hope is that readers are prepared to have a candid conversation about the need for social transformation. By the end of In Inheritance of Drowning, it would be wonderful for readers to demand an end to what drowns us and call for what enriches and sustains BIPOC communities and Puerto Rico.

Dorsía Smith Silva’s debut poetry collection, In Inheritance of Drowning, with a foreword by Vincent Toro, will be published this fall (November 2024) by CavanKerry Press. It is now available for pre-ordering at  https://www.cavankerrypress.org/product/in-inheritance-of-drowning/.

BIOs

Dorsía Smith Silva is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, Best New Poets nominee, Obsidian Fellow, poetry editor of The Hopper, and professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Her poetry has been published in the Denver Quarterly, Waxwing, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Good Girl, editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering, and the co editor of seven books. She has a Ph.D. in Caribbean Literature and Language, and her primary interests are ecopoetry, social and racial justice, mothering and motherhood, and migration. She has also received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and is a member of the Get the Word Out Poetry Cohort of Poets & Writers in 2024.

Keinana Shah is a UWM graduate of English Literature and Cultural Theory, and Business Administration. In pursuit of exploring her various passions, Keinana is learning skills through many types of creative mediums, with a focus on her dream of pursuing art and history.

Mourning for What the Western Wilderness has Become: A Review of Red Shuttleworth’s Straight Ahead

Red Shuttleworth

By Jacob Collins

Boxer and poet Red Shuttleworth’s poetry collection, Straight Ahead, transports its readers to the dusty, forgotten landscape of the western wilderness. Shuttleworth captures this landscape on page in vivid detail and colorful words. This is a rocky land full of coyotes, loss, and “sunflower-tinged dying clouds,” where “the rosy curtain of dusk falls on sagebrush, / silent as something buried-by-hand decades ago” and “the sun gouges an irrigated cropland horizon.” When you read Straight Ahead, it is as though you are out west, wilderness all around you and vibrant sky above. You can feel the oppressive sun beating down on you, hear the coyotes howling in the distance, smell the smoke and whiskey.

But Shuttleworth does more than simply describe the landscape in captivating five-line poems. He instills in this collection a sense of mourning for what the western wilderness has become. As urban areas have expanded, the wilderness has been torn apart, broken down until “you can shake / funeral ashes from the pockets of bankers, / realtors, developers: crazy drooling at ranch houses.” Along with this loss of the wilderness comes the loss of youth an innocence, which “gets left behind like coils of rusty barbed wire / on aged-loose, wobbly corral posts.” Shuttleworth doesn’t just describe this mournfulness to his readers, however. He actively puts his readers into the shoes of one who has lost much in their life, telling them “You’re sober these days, clumsy though, / a sun-scorched, one dog-short, thirsty / old man, blood in your glacier-water eyes.” With only a few lines, Shuttleworth manages to convey a whole life of hardship and loss that any reader will feel deep in their bones.

Shuttleworth masterfully evokes images of a beautiful, dying landscape and fills it with a harrowing mournfulness. Even readers who have never had the chance to lay eyes upon the old western wilderness will feel as though they are there. Straight Ahead leaves readers longing for the wilderness, mourning for its loss even if they’ve never properly known it. Through many small glances into this landscape, Shuttleworth paints a grand picture of a land all but forgotten to time.

You can find Straight Ahead and many more poetry collections here.

 

Friday Flashback: Spring Selections from Cheshire’s Past

Springtime is here, so check out these vintage seasonal offerings from the original Cheshire, two from early, and one from much later, in the magazine’s history. Good and true with age. Happy weekend!

Villanelle — Clarence Owen

When I hear you softly sing,
Little one, with eyes of blue,
All my thoughts are of the Spring.

Violets are blossoming,
Everything seems fresh and new,
When I hear you softly sing.

In the skies the bird’s on wing,
In your eyes the light is true,
And my thoughts are of the Spring.

Little brooks are whispering,
Murm’ring, little one, like you,
When I hear you softly sing.

Though the Autumn winds may ring
Through the trees of sombre hue,
All my thoughts are of the Spring.

Though the Autumn winds may ring
Cold and sadness—sorrow too—
When I hear you softly sing,
All my thoughts are of the Spring.

— Cheshire 1.1 (November 1931)

Approach of Spring — Eunice Rickaby

I’ll bid my daffodils to grow;
I’ll coax my bluebirds back to sing
Songs  that lull me with tales aglow
Of sunshine, showers, sap and spring
Even catching the wind on wing
In their melodies throbbing low.
I’ll bid my daffodils to grow;
I’ll coax my bluebirds back to sing;
And then the mild South wind will blow.
Thoughts of gaiety it will bring,
Pledging spring with flowers on row
To salve the past cold winter’s sting.
I’ll bid my daffodils to grow;
I’ll coax my bluebirds back to sing.

— Cheshire 1.4 (May 1932)

Sonnet — G. Chojnacki

Springtime projects are bound to rise and swell
and point to darkened hothouse flowerbeds.
We sweatsoak feeling clumps until well-fed;
In summer’s striking heat we’re parallel.
The stroke of summer but precedes the spell
when autumn’s musk feels green a touching red
between the sheets of leaves, the rest unsaid;
Too soon the soil is bare, too cold to dwell.
Too cold to dwell on the wrinkled snows of death.
Yet spring is anxious to become a fact;
In fact, the summer too is hard to grasp.
But autumn is the time to catch your breath
and keep it there to hold your love intact;
the seasoned gardener guards against the asp.

— Cheshire 33.2 (Summer 1964)

Friday Flashback: Ted Kooser – Fireflies

In the lead-up to our 50th Anniversary next year, Cream City Review is revisiting work in our Archives. Below is one from Ted Kooser, Pulitizer Prize winner, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and one of the great living writers of contemporary poetry. This poem would go on to appear in his excellent collection Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). Ted’s website can be found here.

Fireflies

The cricket’s pocket knife is bent
from prying up the lid of a can
of new moons. It skips on the grindstone,
chattering, showering sparks
that float away over the darkened yard.

This is the Fourth of July
for the weary ants, who have no union,
who come home black with coal dust.
Deep in the grass you can hear them
unfolding their canvas chairs.

There is a pier that arches out
into the evening, its pilings of shadow,
its planking of breeze, and on it
a woman stands snapping the shade
of a lantern, signaling someone.

– from Cream City Review 16.1 (Spring 1992).