Women's Voices For Change

  Lamentation for the Children   Children come, bringing bliss and wretchedness. They come ready to be bruised. Chain us with the soft tentacles of their openness. Leave us pierced and threaded, bound for time with thorns, singing behind the palings of love. Like children. Though we are not. Don’t look back, not once, at the trembling in your arms,…

As enriching as it is to consider “Blackbody curve” in terms of its scientific allusions or placement in Samiya Bashir’s collection, it’s important to note that the poem stands on its own as an enjoyable and rewarding literary experience.

“Before the Killing Frost” is suffused with longing for the natural world—an almost physical grief at summer’s end—and the longing for a beloved.

“Ink on Paper” seems to prioritize unarticulated feeling over rational thought and movement and communication over holding things tightly and trying to preserve  their physical manifestations.

In the end, we are left not just with a sense of the speaker’s relationship with her mother, both before and after her death, but also with a sense of the history that made her mother the person she was.

The poems in 'Blood Dazzler' present voices never heard on the news during the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, voices not usually part of such reports but which reflect the human side of tragedy.