Diwatas & mermaids & rude greedy sailors &...

There's just so so much going on in this beautiful book of poetry, I'm not sure what to focus on here. Maybe I'll just toss out things as they come to me .

The Creation Story...omg. LOVE. I've always been fascinated with re-telling the traditional creation story and completely remixing it. I really admire what Barbara Jane has done here by using the original creation story as a jump off for her lyrical prose poetry. Here are some of my favorite lines from A Genesis of We, Cleaved (this title, by the way. YES)

In the beginning, a man of dust and fire became bone, and viscera, and flesh. The deity of the wind blessed his lips, and he came to take his first breath. Within this strange vessel, I opened my eyes, and within this, your darkness, I learned to weave song. Do you remember me fluttering inside your chest, tickled by the cool air newly filling your lungs? Do you remember exhaling song on this first day?

 Here we have such a powerful positioning of woman being spiritually alive within man even before she was created in physical form. Of course we all know the original telling, which doesn't mention woman until she is made from Adam's rib. Here in Barbara Jane's piece, the woman lives, breathes and sings within the male body, bodily living as one, yet mentally and emotionally separate and visible. She is even responsible for the songs he sings because it was she she who created them within the darkness of his chest...next to his heart. So powerful and beautiful.

Barbara Jane's "A Genesis of We, Cleaved" gives so much more movement and emotional entry space to the creation story than what I have ever experienced reading the biblical telling. There was space made to identify with these two characters within the poem, and to gauge their own emotional and physical responses to their own new found bodies and interactions. Especially here:

As I learned to breathe without you, as i mimicked the river's lullaby, you appeared upon its banks, your body so fissured, your eyes the ravaged jewels of an umber earth. There were no words for the sorrow bolting through me then, as I watched your hands touch the scarring place where I began. On this third day, my mirror, we learned lamentation and shadow.

And the phrase "my mirror"...so so good.

Also, I feel as if the woman ( i hesitate to call her "Eve" because she isn't identified as so, and it's Barbara Jane's story & character so...) has so much agency in this opening poem. She is a dreamer, a prophetic being, a lover, a healer..she embodies so much between these lines.

I should stop here, but I have to mention that another of my favorite pieces is on pg. 41, The Fire, Around Which We All Gather. The description and detail given of the Diwata is SO satisfying. I can literally see this fierce goddess woman who is everything and none of things that people label her as. Barbara Jane spilled her heart into creating this woman and it comes out in her words: Raising one index finger to her lips in a shhh, she confesses she has many times swooned to the verses of lovers under the slivers of moon, ribbons of stars arranged into hunter and bow. Smoke curls from her lips, her eyes are closing, the diwata has arrived.