Negotiations by Destiny O. Birdsong (review)

Poets, arguably more so than other writers, inherit a great challenge in the responsibility of titling their work. It can be difficult enough to meaningfully encapsulate the breadth of personal experience and translate emotional themes into verse, let alone come to terms with such weighty subjects in a single word or phrase. When a title must bear not only the weight of expression but that of a sociopolitical statement as well, that challenge only increases.

After reading Destiny O. Birdsong's debut poetry collection, Negotiations, some will be left wondering when and how that title was settled upon. Was it an emotional state within which she began, a word plucked from work (the collection's first and title poem), a place landed upon after completion?

Perhaps it derived from the exploratory meaning of the term. In the course of the collection, the reader traces Birdsong's journey through her own mental landscape, traveling from point A to point B in a way that, according to Elizabeth Acevedo, is ferocious "in how it grapples with womanhood, sexuality, assault, and race." In other words, Birdsong negotiates the fraught terrain of these contentious issues, trailblazing through them with a sequence of dialogues, both personal and widely social and cultural, that serve not only as mediations but as bold interventions as well.

With the first poem ("Negotiations")–even the first line–we are confronted with Birdsong's fearlessness:

My pussy is not made of microfiber.I can't put it on my head to conduct business,or plan insurrections. It's not big enoughto hide in, dear reader. It's not bulletproof.It can't be offered to neo-Nazis as a lurefor conversion therapy. That didn't workfor Sally Hemings. I know it can't work for me.

Birdsong is unafraid to bring forth story after story, headline and history, with a marked rapidity in nearly every poem in the collection. With this first poem's initial stanza alone, she evokes a staggering multitude of issues: violence, the patriarchy, LGBTQ issues, hate and bigotry, and the complex reckoning with American history Sally Hemings brings to light—not to mention a chilling foresight with the placement of "insurrections," considering the collection was composed before the tragedies at the Capitol had yet occurred. Birdsong doesn't shy away from saying as much as she can about the state of the world in the space she has available. She will not shrink from what she sees, nor what she wants us to see.

"But I could drive to Charlottesville tonight," Birdsong continues, "sweep blood from its holy soil, like Sally's skirts / dragging the late summer's scorched leaves / across the cobble" working her way to a thesis point in the next important lines "Every day, a woman's ghost / catches on something. Sally's last decade / was spent with her children free, but always under / the threat of her high color."

Birdsong's writing highlights that constant agitated state of alertness when "always under the threat" of one thing or another: skin color, gender, sex, economic status. Her continued deployment of Sally Hemings in the text provides a rich, deeply fraught historical nexus to bind these disparate issues together with an elegant efficiency.

These are heavy poems that ask to be read two or three times over in order to find every kernel of reference and implication. The sense that there is something else yet to learn in turn might send us off to research what the writer/speaker is trying to make understood. Then there are those things she knows we know, that we know must be remembered.

Birdsong's poems are as internally explorative as they are informative of struggles with the external world, blending twisted and lost history with contemporary expressions of those hoary ghosts in our day-to-day.

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