Starred review from September 19, 2022
In this frequently gripping debut, Codjoe offers precisely crafted poems dealing with desire, memory, art, and ancestry. Her interest in public and private looking, in what is seen and perceived over what is, is carefully displayed in poems such as “Labor,” which opens: “The Upper West Side brims/ with Black women heaving Bugaboo/ strollers as if maneuvering horseless plows.” There are well-timed insights throughout the poem—“I know we use/ the same word to describe work/ and the work of giving birth”—building to a personal reckoning that highlights Codjoe’s gift at blending commentary and feeling. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all,” she declares in the title poem. In “Diamondback,” she beautifully likens the snake to “an organ coiled/ deep inside or a lasso/ of lightning and high/ noon,” while the haunting poem “She Said” that makes up the second section poignantly riffs: “the hear in hearing the ear the he the he in she the sh in shame the me the shh in me the ssshhhhh the y in saying the why the say the said the sad the sad i the scared i terrified she tried to say the test in testify.” This excellent book is worth multiple readings.
Starred review from September 1, 2022
The hotly burning poems in Codjoe's debut collection collapse themes of color and body into a lyrical supernova, with reiterated questions about the role of women and art at its center. In an interview, Codjoe explains her obsession with ""heartbeats: image, repetition, transformation, and sound. Finding a pulse, losing it, and finding it again."" In one poem, the artist's primal howl lands echoless in nature, ""Gonna scowl and scream and shepherd my hollering into a green pasture."" In another, the gorgeous viscera of Codjoe's imagery depicts the transformational nature of womanhood, ""Like an organ coiled / deep inside or a lasso / of lightning and high / noon, the rattlesnake / traveled the length / of my spine, sunning itself / inside me."" The serpentine imagery reappears in another poem when the speaker recounts her early understanding of her own literal and metaphorical nakedness, ""It was a snake, loose and green; / it was the snake skin, coiled and discarded."" Other poems abandon familiar logic and melt into wild, associative streams of thought, ""Blue-black blue. The blue / of a bruise. Wild blueberry / blue. The blue you pick. The blue / you choose. The blue that bucks us / like a bull.
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August 1, 2022
"They are composites of photographs, magazine cut-outs, and the occasional life drawing." This line is perhaps as instructive as any to the particular character of Codjoe's first full-length collection of poetry. Not only is she recalling the work of another female artist--an act that proves one of the collection's essential cores, particularly Black women artists across a collection of mediums--but she speaks to the composite nature of her own collection. Here are brief portraits of women, gazing or being gazed upon, creating art or simply existing, shrouded, or, as the title suggests, naked--literally, figuratively, psychologically. It's also a work of careful, exquisite precision: it's no accident that the poem immediately following this reference to "cut-outs" is both a thematic and linguistic continuation: "She wasn't cut out to be a housewife.../ She wasn't cut out to be a soccer mom.../ Her hands were cold." Yet elsewhere, Codjoe captures the unsettled nature of our most emotional worlds: "It was a Saturday or Sunday in November or July." VERDICT The collection's organizing principle can feel a bit injudicious at times, with some poems easily bleeding into the next while others feel like slamming into a wall, but the potency of Codjoe's language and keenness of her thematic renderings never fails to enthrall. Fiercely intelligent and both emotionally and formally rich.--Luke Gorham
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