New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2021. 95 pages. $26.95.
In a mixture of the minute and the momentous, filled with references to people and events familiar and perhaps less familiar, Sandra Beasley’s collection Made to Explode delves into narratives real and imagined in places worthy of consideration that ask to be noticed. Beasley has produced a collection of poems that begins by unflinchingly looking back in order to move forward and learn from the emotional turmoil the past conjures.
The poem that opens the book, “Heirloom,” considers the journeys of potatoes and tomatoes as they have made their way to American mealtime, “. . . what were once waste scraps fed to the cows / now repackaged.” The poem reveals how poverty removes the option for healthier food, the possibility of tasting “. . . your Brandywines, / your Cherokee Purples, your Green Zebras” in exchange for “the claustrophobia . . . unleashed from cans / to feed four children on a budget.” Beasley enshrines in a poem what was “enshrined in the freezers of America,” offering entrepreneurial opportunity, as well as the means to feed struggling families.
This feeling, of reaching back into the past to inform the present, permeates Beasley’s fourth collection of poems that invoke people and events from America’s sordid and nostalgic past; Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Einstein all make appearances in prose poems, as do the Cherry Tree Rebellion of 1938 and the Titanic’s fateful voyage. Other poems reach into the speaker’s past to reveal occasions with food and a focus on living with food allergies. In “An Accommodation,” the speaker lets the reader know
the first time I eat a thing
I can eat anything.
The allergy requires initial exposurebefore my mast cells gather,
before my body says No.
The poem draws attention to the differences illuminated when someone with an allergy requires food and the “. . . need to center me / on the table, to call my portion // naked or plain while offering / others the “real” version.” As if a person is “other,” separate, and uniquely considered.
The notion of the “other” pervades the entire collection in which events that have shaped the idea of America into a racist country unwilling to change its ways attempt to divulge what has made this a foregone conclusion. Beasley’s poems reveal evil and heartbreak that accompany many of the symbols Americans revere. Thomas Jefferson, creator of the Declaration of Independence also “. . . created a system for tipping” his slaves, which sounds like something positive until the next lines of “Monticello Peaches” reveal:
Once, James Hemings was whipped
three times over before the sun had set
behind Brown’s Mountain.
And the revelations don’t stop there. Of course, Americans are aware that Jefferson was a slave holder, but Beasley provides details that some might not know that shed more darkness on Jefferson’s legacy. Poetic language mingles with history in this significant poem of the collection and exposes cruelty, misogyny, and cultural appropriation in devastating imagery and metaphor:
There are two types of peaches:
one to which the stone clings,
shredding to wet threads,
and another allowed to lift clean.
Within Beasley’s collection is a section of prose poems, followed by a lineated elegy that simultaneously shatters the myths of history, fells forefathers’ legacies, and attempts to right wrongs perpetrated on so many. In “Einstein, Midnight” Beasley draws attention to the expected common knowledge of the man—his work that went into the Manhattan Project—and ends with an unexpected “yarn-bombing,” the speaker allowing that “Anything, in the right hands, can be made to explode.” The title placement is organic, feels natural, as one thing leads to another poetically and in precise metaphorical beats.
Many of the poems in the collection cover familiar territory—places most have been or heard of, like a Long John Silver’s fast-food place; history many have learned, like the sinking of the Titanic; knowledge that feels common, like Buzz Aldrin’s moonwalk; things heard and known throughout a lifetime of living in the United States, like Ore-Ida frozen tater tots and peaches grown in the South. A number of poems, however, explore the alien territories where new learning takes place. Where the familiar and the unfamiliar often meet can be found in the details Beasley provides, viewing common ground through a lens that shakes the foundation and weakens the earth underfoot, as in “Weak Ocean” where “Someone always lets the earthquake out.”
The two Golden Shovels, a form created by Terrence Hayes in which lines end with words from poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, offers perspectives that shed light on people and events and the assumptions that linger long after they are gone. Using every word of Brooks’s “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” Beasley’s “Black Death Spectacle” presents the day of Emmett Till’s funeral with details that have come to light in recent years: that Carolyn Bryant’s claims were untrue and, even if they were, would not warrant what had been done to fourteen-year-old Emmett, that her husband was a violent man who would have “slapped her silly” if he had “heard even a tint / of recanting.” The poem simultaneously depicts the scene and offers commentary on art and poetry, asking the reader to ask of the poet “what gets colored in.” The second of the two poems in the Golden Shovel form, “Non-Commissioned: A Quartet” ends its lines with the words of Brooks’s “Gay Chaps at the Bar,”—the last sonnet in a twelve-sonnet sequence—and delves into the realities of battlefields and suggests that bringing up boys to be soldiers is similar to raising geese for foie gras. Each of the four sections of the poem plumbs Brooks’s intentions for the ambivalence and devotion that exist in the veterans about whom she writes. Beasley recognizes Brooks’s poems as art that comes from suffering, not only that of those who have died for causes or for nothing but the mothers who raised those children, praising their sons’ bravery and intelligence, their athletic prowess while “teaching . . . the language of easy victory.”
Beasley’s collection explores space, time, and history in poems that illuminate truth while casting shade on what people are taught about a past of which Americans cannot always be proud. Her poems enlighten and expose, reveal and chastise. In a final allusive poem after C. P. Cavafy’s “Ithaka,” Beasley turns to the journey in all of its blame and absurdities, and the speaker takes “a swig of a Bloody Mary, / spiked with ocean and jalapeno,” after eating from “a bowl of boiled peanuts” that are poison, her final act of going home.