Barrelhouse Reviews: The Wild Fox of Yemen, by Threa Almontaser

Review by Sam Risak

Graywolf Press / April, 2021 / 112 pages

The Wild Fox of Yemen is a debut collection with an appetite for uprising. In three numbered sections, poet Threa Almontaser writes from the point of view of a Yemeni-American woman who will no longer be constrained to the binary expectations prescribed to her. Whether she is fighting to reclaim her femininity or the Yemeni portion of her identity, the collection is carnal, animalistic, and hungry for change: “Famine happens // when we can’t remember our name, the village / we come from,” Almontaser writes in the poem “Hunger Wraps Itself.” “I want to deserve eating.”

Rather than guilt or regret for the assimilation the speaker practiced early on in her life, the voice that propels this collection is one of defiance. The speaker is taking charge, and she makes this clear to readers in “Hunting Girliness,” the opening poem:

I lace bitch-loud // boots to the knees. Scab soft skin / on asphalt. Peel the grit whenever // my blood hardens. I am at war. I go out / to hunt girliness. Find her crouched, camouflaged // like a fugitive between the forsythias. / I load my brother’s bb gun, ignore / her old insistence, begging herself pink.

It is not femininity, but the passivity associated with it, that is the target of the speaker’s aggression. And she is aggressive. When you couple the short words and sentences with the frequent alliteration, the poem sounds like a rallying call; it’s difficult to read Almontaser’s words without wanting to join her in arms against whatever weak-willed versions of ourselves hide in the bushes.

Both the hunted and the huntress, Almontaser uses this power dynamic to embody the war the speaker wages against her younger self as well as the one that wages between Yemeni and American identities. She has grown up in the U.S., and both her home country and her proximate family have asked her to assimilate. Compared to the starvation they risked in Yemen, it feels like a small price to pay. But the speaker knows otherwise. In white America, she could suppress her hunger for Yemen all she wants and not feel any safer.  The speaker is marked as predator and treated like prey, a status that pushes her to reject her mother’s requests to stop being reckless: “I quit being cautious in third grade / when the towers fell &, later, wore // the city’s hatred as a hijab.”

Rather than continue to hide her Yemeni identity, the speaker fights to embolden it—a fight that includes a return to Arabic. Since the language is largely absent in her house apart from scoldings and “baba’s dirty jokes,” the speaker uses jumbled language and syntax to replicate what it’s like to formulate thoughts in her abandoned language: “accent the want I back them want I / lugha songy-sing my back” (“Recognized Language”). Not one to admit defeat, Almontaser takes an active step to revive her language by working through her struggle and incorporating works of translation into the book. She notes that there is a severe want for English translation of Arab and Asian works, and in response, she offers two translated works by Arabic poet Al-Baradouni where the original Arabic appears alongside her English version.

Like the two columns in which these translations are presented, several other poems use their form to create opposition on the page. Whether it’s the two side-by-side stanzas in “Middle Eastern Music,” a poem that explores the experience of listening to the genre in the U.S., or “Feast, Beginning w/ a Kissed Blade,” a poem that takes the shape of a lamb while describing the butchery of one, the poems’ paradoxical structures highlight the contrasting forces that inform the speaker’s identity. Perhaps the most significant example of this is the series of three “Dream Interpretations” that appear in each section of the book. These feature the apricot, the fox, and finally the sea. Each poem floats possible meanings and describes the dream the speaker had that involved each topic. In all three of the poems, the dreams are influenced, but not satisfied, by either interpretation:

Sea //

Placed at your feet means you will inherit a large amount of shoes that are not your size. //

Walking into one fully garbed means you will drive someone dear to you out of your life.  //

There is another burkini ban somewhere and it is over a hundred degrees, but women strip only their shoes. A few sit in the waves like ocean litter—glossy black bags tossed in and left to soak. I can’t find my sandals. Nothing in this dream is my size.

In her struggle to find words, Almontaser has created a new language. In it, Shaytan and Power Rangers exist in the same line; epigraphs are provided by both Nicki Minaj and Yemeni ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh; and an arranged marriage is refused as readily as the touch of a “barbeque-sticky” white boy. Like the collection’s title animal, The Wild Fox of Yemen is a shapeshifter, a revolt against forced binaries, a refusal to be fed lies that cause so many others to starve.

A Florida transplant, Sam Risak currently lives in Southern California where she is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and has just completed an MA in English at Chapman University. An editorial assistant at CRAFT Literary and a reader/reviewer at TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, she writes across genres and has works published or upcoming in Lit Hub, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Terrain.org, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Crab Orchard Review, and Writer’s Digest.