Obadike and Bohince

This book was a complete disappointment. I normally don’t like using blanket statements like that to describe a work, but I found Obadike’s “Armor and Flesh” wholly lacking in our areas of focus. I was consistently unimpressed by each individual poem, and despite some attempts to tackle layered conflicts, the blatant objective of the poems made them flat and uninteresting, employing clichés like “She wears a mask,” or “Is chance/a cousin of romance?” and basic puns like “she sneezes/on the chance someone/will bless her” (which would arguably work as a line, but certainly not an entire poem).

Obadike’s attempt at form was equally disappointing: “Eschew and Languish” as well as “Carpool and the Tape Deck” were immediately transparent as a villanelle and sonnet (respectively), and showed basically no control or play with either form. Also, the devotion to the form completely stifled her content, resulting in stanzas like “Don’t watch me when we dance. / I don’t love you. I don’t. / All that you feel is chance.” The rhymes become so predictable, that I had essentially recited the poem prior to reading it. The sonnet started out with more promise, an actually story, without some direct allegory to be forced down the eye sockets of the reader. Unfortunately, Obadike once again compromised word choice in order to maintain the form, awkwardly throwing in chunky sentences about the car resembling a circus.

Obadike’s serves as an example of a poet who seems unable to craft strong, individual poems, and instead strings them together, hoping the result will be more elaborate and beautiful. Regrettably, predictability and stale language of each piece inhibited any chance (or more accurately, desire) to absorb a theme.

On Bohince:

Paula Bohince’s “Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods” used bizarre and engaging descriptions that had me rereading individual poems over and over again. Her word choice is so deliberate, that even when I’m not fully sold on an image, her consistency and devotion to one voice is difficult to criticize. She consistently mixes simple diction with long, scientific phrases, and words you haven’t heard or thought of in years. The eerie “Trespass” is somehow terrifying and delicate: “Above and around us, the electric fence/ hums like God--/ a magnification of the dreaming gnats we awakened/ discovering the lode of bones.”

Despite her pristine voice, we are constantly finding ourselves outside, alone or in danger. The contrast is certainly appealing enough to pull you to the next poem. Conversely, the drawn-out imagery and frequent density do make the collection more difficult to read in one sitting, but the slow progression of one central story make it fairly easy to pick up again.