Push away the table and say Damn

Aracelis Girmay cooks up and offers a collection of poetry that will leave anyone who reads it thirsty for more of her words and inspiration. Her collection “Teeth” is composed of many poems that have the power to speak universally to everyone if one takes the time to feel her words. \nA collection of poetry is just as equal to a novel, I believe, as the poems that make up the collection are arranged in a way to tell a story. While the story may not be linear, it is a story through words as the poems tell stories through each other.\nGirmay’s poetry collection is full of soul and song. With repetition of words throughout some of her poems, she is able to build a beat that lasts long after the poem is finished. \nIn her poem “Here,” the title word is repeated numerous times through descriptive imagery. The poem reads almost as a stream of consciousness, filled with different thoughts and feelings.\nThe poem is emotional, as the opening line of the poem, “Because I wanted to write a poem that would make me / push away from the table and say Damn,” is filled with a mysterious force that is driven by the desire to release the energy within it. \nBut the poem ends on a beautiful and brilliant vision of hope and preservation through struggle as she writes, “Here is a god to make you sing and pray to, / oh, good and wrecked and here and here and here.” \nThis isn’t the only poem of Girmay’s that offers hope at the end of misfortune. Others, such as “Epistolary Dream Poem After Finding a Schoolbook Map,” offer not only hope, but unity through cultures and a strength that is found through these ties.\nThe first poem in the collection, “Arroz Poetica,” deals with the reality and raw emotion of suffering, death and cruelty in the world in response to war, but the concepts within the poem are universal. She writes, “and although it is my promise here / to try to open every one of my windows, I cannot / imagine the intimacy with which / a life leaves its body” –a line filled with a deep connection to the emotions of the world.\nGirmay connects to the audience with her universal concepts about life, love, death, suffering and cruelty – but her poems always come back to tell the story of how life survives because of hope to prevail and the endurance of love throughout all of this misfortune.\nPoetry collections offer many stories, similar to novels. Unlike novels, poetry’s language is more playful, more discrete when it comes to its message, but both fiction and poetry offer stories to the world. \nIf you haven’t read poetry before, try Girmay’s collection of poems telling stories of survival and of hope. By the end of reading her collection you’ll not only be inspired to try reading other books of poetry, you’ll also want to push away the table and say Damn.