Book Reviews

Donika Kelly

The Renunciations

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations sees its greatest impact when panned out to see the full picture. Zooming out adds nuance. On the whole, Kelly is, as the title suggests, rejecting the contents inside. They are framed within units of time that repeat: NOW, THEN, AFTER. The renunciations, then, are Kelly’s reckoning. This elegiac collection on divorce and trauma, when seen from a distance, is a rebellion.

I restarted the book just a few pages in to give myself a better understanding of the big picture, and because I had some shallow misgivings: The poems collected here, especially early on, have the accessible, short-phrase-deep-sentiment vibe of Instagram poets—and I heard the chain bookstore couldn’t keep the collection in stock.

While reading, I realized I am a giant hypocrite. Language is made to be understood. I lectured a (poor, sweet) friend who works in the sciences about poetry. I told her that most people who don’t like poetry haven’t read poetry on their own. I told her poetry isn’t supposed to be hard to understand. I told her good poetry isn’t esoteric: It’s accessible. And Kelly blurs the line that snobs like me think separates accessible from artful. After some content warnings, I’d give The Renunciations to folks hoping to start reading poetry who believe they don’t “get it.”

Those content warnings are important. Our narrator recounts assaults, incest, often encased in delicate metaphor (such as in the poem “Mounting Dead Butterflies Is Not Hard”), but without pulling her punches. A beautiful, clever, tool Kelly employs in these cases is her use of blank space. No dialogue in The Renunciations and no words specific to assault are ever printed. Instead, between every pair of quotation marks is blank space. Kelly reminds us that poetry on paper is a visual medium, implores us: Notice what is missing.

I want to reiterate that The Renunciations is an approachable example of the great variety of shapes and techniques that poetry can assume. I’d accuse Kelly of showing off if the collection weren’t so deeply vulnerable. An example of her dalliance with The Renunciations as Master Class is this moment from one of many untitled poems framed as epistolary:

“I am an overreaction: a boil of skin and itch and breath hitched like a child

realizing it is lost.”

Each section but the final one begins with an erasure poem, just a snapshot, serving maybe as an epigraph for each section. Each is addressed like a letter, like a censor got to it, leaving me hoping to read the missing text in the following poem, which also starts, “Dear-.” But we aren’t given that. I suspect this letdown is intentional. Kelly is flexing, giving us a taste of wanting.

In an early poem about her divorce, our narrator recounts taking her wife’s last name, her wife celebrating this, and offers what may be my favorite line of the year: “I know I am a palimpsest,” suggesting she herself is the word on paper, introducing the theme of dominion subtly, lovingly. Kelly passes through conversational, poignant, confessional and, through the collection, moves from the moments of acute pain to the moment when healing begins. —Sarah Elgatian

Matt l. Drabek

Left Foreign Policy: An Organizer’s Guide

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE PRESS

Matt L. Drabek doesn’t just provide tragic history lessons of American hegemony in his new book Left Foreign Policy: An Organizer’s Guide. With references as diverse as Noam Chomsky and Star Trek: The Next Generation, he provides the context of ongoing developments that make this book timely. Of equal importance, he offers guidance on how to organize to help create a better world.

Drabek is an anti-war activist and organizer around working class issues based in Iowa City. He runs the blog Base and Superstructure, is an active member of the Iowa City Tenants Union and is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Iowa City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

He started the book last year, dipping into a wellspring of personal experiences from over two decades. Shortly after September 11, 2001, he was a college freshman at Indiana University when he had his “first taste of political activism” after meeting a “motley crew” of activists who organized a peace camp on campus.

“These were rich, valuable experiences,” Drabek writes, experiences which set him on “a path to a lifetime of leftist activism.” On the other hand, his time at the peace camp also “provided lessons in the shortcomings of activist movements, particularly anti-war activism.” The leftists that Drabek refers to “... stand against capitalism and want to replace it with democratic ownership and control of the world’s economic system,” he wrote. “The left favors economic democracy as a replacement for the system of economic authoritarianism and oligarchy we call ‘capitalism.’”

While the left is in general agreement on various issues, there is a lack of consensus in terms of foreign policy. Constructing a necessary foreign policy consensus, based on four building blocks (international solidarity, anti-interventionism, pluralism and fighting global capital), could help build an integrated movement and advance leftist goals.

“Leftists must learn to take these experiences—the focused community-building events centered around activist circles—and broaden them to more people and larger communities,” Drabek writes.

With a goal to “help create the grounding for a left foreign policy consensus,” Drabek examines U.S. relations with seven countries in four key regions (Latin America, Middle East, East Asia and Sub-Suharan Africa) to reveal and further develop a set of basic foreign policy principles.

“Through these principles,” Drabek writes, “the Left can connect the most visible manifestations of U.S. empire and hegemony to the everyday, less visible actions that form the substance of the Washington bipartisan foreign policy consensus. After the left connects these things, it can present a positive alternative of its own.”

This isn’t the last word on the subject, nor is it intended to be. The left will always have disagreements, Drabek notes. Left Foreign Policy is a scholarly yet accessible introduction on how to unite people who want to dismantle the war machine and organize for socialist causes but don’t know where to begin. ––Mike Kuhlenbeck