Haiti Glass by Lenelle Moïse (review)

Haiti Glass inspires a willingness to walk on shards. It beckons one's ears to hear the crunching sounds of what remains underfoot, wrecked, neglected, and one must keep the eyes open so as not to misstep—or miss the meaning of lines. Lines are tricky, and Lenelle Moïse's cadence is not regular: it is not molded in the classical tradition of terse verse, or in the predictability of forms. Haiti Glass is a performative hybrid of poetry, prose, theater, and spoken word. It is a house of memories that contains rooms of expression, inhabited by multiple voices: colorful, edgy, watchful, risky, risqué, and intellectually honest.

The first stanza of the poem "gift a sea" illustrates this complexity as the voice in the poem (the poet's voice, one can assume) wrestles with the verbal violence of her grandfather.

after i becamegrandfather called me drynasty namesstood small in my kitchenbaking kisses at midnightpraying rocksagainst the womenin my love

Despite the "dry / nasty names" that the grandfather hurled at the subject of the poem, the "i" who "became" and who is also rendered "small" in the first stanza is the same as the speaker of the poem. This narrator goes on to rescue the grandfather in the second stanza, offering him to the world as a humane soul who unknowingly gave agency to his granddaughter. Moïse writes:

but beforewhen i was tiny thirstyhe bought me a vintage typewriterheavy and teal it splashed under my palms a thrifted gift a sea in my bloodthe first toolmy damp fingers usedto cool and name my self.

Here, the smallness of the speaker disappears and she becomes fortified through the act of self-naming (via a "thrifted" medium that "gift[ed] a sea" of possibilities). Through the precise use of language, Moïse marshals her adjectives, nouns, and verbs to build magnetic, piquant poems. Moreover, as a playwright and a performer, Moïse knows how to hook her audience. The enjambments of her poetic lines carry deep syntactical intentionality as she draws in the reader or listener. "Praying rocks," for example, is an odd yet effective phrase that carries an affective result when it is linked to or against the lover. In a sense, the grandfather's inability to hurl rocks at the lover has resulted in his "praying rocks" so that the lover might still be harmed. Haiti Glass is a careful promenade within Moïse's intimate house, where not a single room is dull and where the poet, very early on, refuses to be a kept doll by maintaining a keen awareness of her environment.

Moïse begins her book with the title poem, "haiti glass," which presents a very unusual construction of the syllables that constitute the metrical feet per line. This poem takes the form of couplets that, while appearing uneven, contain a hidden metrical scheme of eight syllables each. Poems written in English often follow the pentameter, which consists of ten syllables per line—five stressed and five unstressed. Here, however, the falling meter, with reversed syllabic line schemes of 3/5 or 5/3 or equal syllabic schemes of 4/4, forms an unusual rhythm or pattern. The last couplet is different, with a total of nine syllables in a 6/3 pattern, which could have been the result of an editor requesting the article "the" to be inserted in the last couplet. Through "haiti glass," Moïse demonstrates her essential control of language in content, syntax, and rhythm. Thus, reading the first two couplets, one is immediately aware of the author's mastery and playfulness in constructing the poem in the way she did:

haiti glasshaiti glassstar in my mouth

beautiful burningspiky light

wish so hardscrapes my soft palates

tongue a shadowof swollen loss

language of shardsflicker stutter

pronouncing the distancerays bruise gums

How could such...