Barrelhouse Reviews: Love Letters to the Revolution, by Angelique Zobitz
Review by Kim Jacobs-Beck
American Poetry Journal / November 2020 / 36 pages
Angelique Zobitz’s first chapbook, Love Letters to the Revolution, is a powerful, sophisticated debut. Addressed to the poet’s daughter, whom she calls “The Revolution,” these poems center on the experience of Black girlhood to motherhood in direct, taut language and demonstrate Zobitz’s strong formal range.
The book uses poetic form effectively and is matched well to content. In the centos which open and close the book, Zobitz draws on the voices of other Black writers (bell hooks, Lucille Clifton, Ntozake Shange, Toi Derricotte, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Rita Dove), creating a network of strong women to reinforce her speaker’s own voice. The effect is of a family, or a whole neighborhood, of wise women watching over this child. The prose poem “All of Our Business and Ours,” crackles with the anger of a mother who has heard enough, addressed to the staff at her daughter’s daycare: “…if I should dislike the information I receive either I or her father yes he IS my husband, we are married, yes we were married before we were pregnant, no he is not my sugar daddy, yes he is White, nevertheless yes I know she does look like her daddy, please stay focused, one of us will be calling.” The poem effectively uses the run-on rhythms of angry utterance to make its infuriating, heartbreaking point.
This book is not a sentimental love letter, not a lullaby; instead, the speaker addresses the reader in a no-nonsense, incisive voice. She tells us clearly that mothering is complicated, helping a daughter weather sexism and racism is hard, and raising a biracial daughter adds to the degree of difficulty. Zobitz employs erasure in “Pyriscience,” a poem commemorating Black women murdered (erased) by police or vigilantes, amplifying the theme with tragic examples from the news. Voice is explicitly woven into these poems; in “Full-Throated,” the second poem in the chapbook, the speaker rejects the ways of her “grandma’s people,” those who kept quiet: “The fumes of their words are why/my throat is dry from how often/I refuse to choke gag reflex/fix my mouth.” Instead, the speaker says, “I too want words/soft on skin soft on psyche/lapping softly on inner/ear revolutionary love words,/like: you matter.”
Though the book announces itself as addressed to a daughter, it also contains several poems about the speaker’s experiences prior to motherhood. The most startling of these is “Kink Therapy or an Alternate History of the World.” Here, the speaker unflinchingly describes her experience as a Black dominatrix with white male clients, implying an inversion of enslavement. Yet she recognizes that sexual role play does not measure up to slavery: “He sought absolution and I spoke reparations, I told him to let it go. And he came and I came to the conclusion, the opposite of a mirror still doesn’t have a name.” The frankness of this poem is a good example of the overall tone of the book: Zobitz’s narrator insists that we hear her.
All of the poems in Love Letters to the Revolution insist in this way, but the one that lingers most effectively is “Mame Coumba Bang Speaks to the Revolution,” where the speaker weaves the gestation and birth of her child into the myth of a Senegalese river goddess: “You were born from legend dear child./The fishermen learned of us first—//before plunder, before thirst, before/baptism, before suckling at breast//there was me and you nestled in me.” The incarnation of the goddess in the child, and in the mother, transforms parental dreams for a child from the usual hopes for happiness and success into a different story. In this one, the goddess speaks a life of power and mystery into existence, of emulating “the river ready to take more than you need.” The poem’s clear imagery and incantatory rhythm mesh perfectly with its topics of motherhood and mythos.
Love Letters to the Revolution is an impressive chapbook as demonstrated by its clear voice and deft leveraging of poetic techniques. Angelique Zobitz is a poet to watch.
Kim Jacobs-Beck grew up in the metro Detroit area and now lives in Ohio. She is the author of a chapbook, Torch (Wolfson Press). Her poems can be found in Nixes Mate, Gyroscope, Apple Valley Review, SWWIM Every Day, roam literature, among others. She is the founder of Milk & Cake Press and teaches at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College. Her website is kimjacobsbeck.com.