Geographies of Soul and Taffeta by Sarah Sarai (review)

Sarah Sarai’s new collection Geographies of Soul and Taffeta, published by Michael Broder’s Indolent Books (also the force behind the HIV Here & Now Project, a countdown to thirty-five years of AIDS on June 5, 2016), depends on a clear-eyed speaker to lead the reader through bumps and scrapes of life on the fringe of an American city, site of constant seepage, recycling of waste back into the human body.

In “An Interlude on the Poetics of Dirt, Part II” (ON Contemporary Practice), a conversation with Brenda Iijima, CAConrad ends by talking about toxic soil pollution in the United States. He says, “What do we do each day, how many things do we do each day which contribute to the infractions of a delicate order of all that is living, needs what we take, spoils, terminates, seepages seeping back to our bodies?” Sarai’s poems bear out clarity of vision in circumstances of senseless accumulation and look on as a culture serves up/out dangerously simplified ideas.

What are geographies of soul and taffeta? Consider the choice of “geographies” over “cartographies” or “topographies.” The field of geography includes the study of human impact on the earth; it can include both city planning and plate tectonics, but also the shape or curve of landscapes. Upon these geographies, various forms of matter meet and mingle: soul and taffeta. Juxtaposing the astral and physical planes, Sarai’s choice of organic and synthetic materials here evokes the dynamic requisites of society, or community, for the individual who’d like to survive with her mind intact. The poems in this collection matter and are matter, as in “Popular Mechanics”:

By way of electron molecule scattering, rotational excitation, ball bearings greased up and scooting down pinball chutes, the body confirms its presence in our lives. It’s psychedelic.

Component cellular material in constant motion propels human experiences, and provides us means to translate consciousness into language; “psychedelic” aptly sums up the system. This poem’s last line, “half a sandwich could help,” turns the microscopic into the everyday. The speaker has fallen asleep on the subway and in her dream state, the plea for half a sandwich merges with ideas about neuron activity landing soundly as a deep image. After all, something simple and small could help.

Sarai’s poems allude to concepts from astronomy and physics, but also to childhood religious upbringings, queer relationships, and the duty to maintain employment, but she tempers her subject matter with humor, wordplay and a friendly, knowing irony.

For instance, the poem “Love Letter” addresses a former lover with bittersweet fondness. Sarai writes, “I got the damn job. / It was twenty percent creative.” Such a job is the kind of mixed blessing poets are always in search of. If we don’t have it, we want it, but once we get it, we hate it. Moreover, we are right in both cases as “twenty percent creative” is just enough to buy our loyalty, and Sarai is clear-eyed about the compromises necessary for survival under capitalism. To boot, the former lover facilitated getting the job in this poem, acting as agent while her personal limitations (on generosity?) foreclosed the relationship:

Every woman has her limits? Like I don’t know that. Like it doesn’t tear me apart.

In the aftermath, the speaker is not comforted by her own understanding, but resigned to her loss. Like most poems in this collection, “Love Letter” is self-contained, ending here with narrative clarity and a parallel grammatical flourish. Sarai applies a tourniquet to the broken heart and moves forward.

With the workplace as daily backdrop, a poet is well-equipped to critique all sorts of inherited structures, including the mythic nuclear family. A network of sisters appears in a few poems, most memorably Jean in “Family.” The poem recalls childhood group outings to horror movies, specifically The Exorcist and Jaws. The steely distance between the speaker and her eldest sister is brought into sharp relief when, as the shark lurches from the...