Richmond, VA: Diode Editions, 2021. 100 pages. $18.00.
Shanta Lee Gander’s dedicates her remarkable debut, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues to “all of us who had to be audacious as we dared to be.” In our time of intersectional reckoning, audacity is the driving force of this collection, with its dizzying array of new and hybrid forms that move from dream montages to curated museum exhibits, and from brief lyric moments to long numbered sequences. The themes of dreaming and waking weave through the book, constructing a dreamscape of past and present. GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA’s first section is “Fugue State,” evoking the dissociative disorder in which a person temporarily loses their sense of personal identity and wanders away from their home and workplace. In the book’s fugue poems, the speaker wanders, seeks, and reinvents identities by carrying generational burdens as she navigates a palimpsest of childhood memory and trauma.
The poem “Ghettoclaustrophobia” opens the book—a list of fragmented definitions for Gander’s neologism, asserting the poet’s power to redefine language:
/’gedō klôstrǝ’fōbēǝ/
Whether place people, state of mind,
you be locked in until you don’t want to be.
By forging the term out of two familiar nouns, Gander breaks from received grammar and reworks the roots of human expression, challenging our assumptions about the meaning of “ghetto.” The title poem announces the book’s intention to resist categorization and expectations as it reinvents “Black girlhood in America” and journeys into unknown territory, both linguistic and personal.
Gander has stated elsewhere that she does not associate the term “ghetto” with any particular place or culture, and the first poem reinforces this openness. She envisions “Ghettoclaustrophics” as “Any group of people. / They evade capture. / They evade description.” In this way, all speakers of Gander’s shapeshifting poems are nimble and evasive, refusing to be locked into a language and a history that has tried to erase them.
The book unearths the unseen, reclaiming memory and the Black female body, searching for the mother and ancestors while breaking free from past harm. Skilled at musicality, Gander uses repetition and rhythmic cadences to tap into a legacy of strength and resilience. In “Girl Child,” every line ends on the same word, a percussive syllable shifting from “child” to “chile” and back. Gander often moves between Standard English and African American vernacular English:
. . . did you see? Your own mama, chile
she a tale flashin her tail. That chile
earned motherhood too early child
Forget the boys! Barbie’s a safer bet. Child,
forget anything about being cute child.
A skilled storyteller, Gander also employs more traditional poetic forms. Early in the book, the I-speaker addresses the mother figure directly in a long narrative written in quatrains, “The Mother Who Brung Ya (I)”:
I searched for my dignity amid
forced trips to Salvation Army,
those musty racks wrapping us
in the decaying urbanYou found yours
in designer imposter perfumes. . . .
Seeking Mama in every memory, the speaker questions reality and authenticity, exploring the mother-daughter dynamic and making meaning from her origin story. She charts the mother’s scars, dimples, and favorite color (purple, for Prince), remembering “How your hazel eyes / glittered like glass when angry / How oversized shirts / covered your shame.” Later, in “Mama & Papa in Daylight,” she evokes childhood trauma, the loneliness of a world where “Pinching replaces talking / Glaring substitutes affection” and the child must learn to soothe herself with language: “If I can make myself small, / I can make myself invisible.”
But GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA also shifts from the experience of invisibility to a story of self-definition. There is power in truth-telling, and Gander claims it with a fresh voice. “I keep vigil in my own mirror,” she declares, refusing to be trapped or defined by trauma—“the rot in the corner.” In Gander’s poetics of unearthing, the maternal is not merely personal or biographical but a cosmic force. The sequence “Black Book of Creation” invokes a primordial goddess figure who exists before language and offers solace and creative energy:
Mother sits fashioning her children.
Cosmic clay, stardust, and obsidianfor resilience, dreams for seeing,
and the things not contained by language . . .
As the collection progresses, the speaker looks back at where she came from, seeking the names and voices of her forebears. If there is redemption to be found, it is in the ancestral line, a maternal lineage that cannot be broken: “But mama’s mama’s mama’s mama / claps back from forgotten.” The repetition of the word “mama” becomes an incantation in the book, a magical utterance conferring power and conviction. From the speaker’s beloved grandmother “Mama Grand” to “Mama’s mama’s mama’s mama / some kind of medicine woman,” this lineage of women is a source of strength and imaginative force, a gateway to the sacred feminine.
But a fugue state is also a kind of haunting, and ghosts of the past haunt these poems through unspeakable horrors endured by ancestors, images of chattel slavery, and lynchings. “Ghosts hung / along a mapped highway of dead roads, we / became the spirits roaming the topography,” writes Gander. Here the speaker becomes the messenger, the wandering truth-teller, and even the trickster, mercurial: “the one who evades naming, / the one who refuses / mapping.” In this feat of refusal and evasion, the poet insists on her own power.
In “Syna-ghetto-sthesia: An Exhibition,” Gander invents another new word for her myriad experiences, blending the tastes, smells, sounds and sights of the apartments and people of her youth. The personal and familial can’t be separated from socioeconomic reality and systemic racism, the history of displacement and the transatlantic slave trade, redlining and white flight.
Inside Apartment 3D, we learn the pressures and scrutiny of Black girlhood: “Bodies the cola of butta, taste like distance taste like / the way we all watched, You pretty for a dark girl.” Gander reveals how the girl-child is seen as a dangerous entity that must be contained, how a headscarf turned halter top can become a perilous item. In “Lessons in Development from a Butterfly,” Gander explores female trauma and posttraumatic growth through the four stages of egg, larva, pupa, and adult. A feminist tour de force, the poem wields metaphor as a source of healing and claim to survival. It begins with taut lines of abuse to the body and psyche: “At 7, my body becomes a playscape. / Playing house gone wrong in dark closets . . .” Later, we see twelve-year-old girl-child alone in her pubescent shame, “fluent in secrets, bilingual in lying / and silence,” learning her value as a sexual object. But the adult speaker emerges from the chrysalis and teaches herself how to speak her own desire, draw her own boundaries. She becomes “fluent in / No” and confident in her resilience—a “trained expert in survival.”
GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA’s last poems declare strength. Now fluent in silence-breaking and myth-making, the speaker reckons up all that has gone missing—people, places, music, food—shining light on the dark places and naming what has happened in order to claim her own story and identity:
If it isn’t named, if it isn’t spoken,
then it didn’t really happen
Gander asserts her place as a writer of history and a visionary of future empowerment: “I’m the cartographer of how it’s all supposed to be…” By unearthing memory that is personal, cultural, and historical, she enacts a search for meaning and creates a new language for a lost adolescence, fueled by the need to articulate the self, to be fully seen and known. There is potency in the telling and re-telling, affirmed in the penultimate poem, “We Got . . .” Speaking in first-person plural, Gander insists, “It’s the stories that make us shine.” The collective female voice holds power and magic: “We be the alchemists . . . / fashioning ourselves from the wreckage of memory.”