Obadike & Bohince

Obadike’s collection uses simple language. Her poems most often consist of short lines. Yet, these factors do not make her poetry elementary at all. It is still intensely packed with emotion. She gets down to the raw simplicity of the heart, mind, and body. The poems are packed with feelings of uncertainty dealing with love, and self-identification. In several poems, the speaker does not want the person they are with to look at them though they still seem to want that person present.

“I just like how your hands / Hold on to me so tight. / Don’t watch me when we dance” (26).

The speaker wants the other there, not because they love them, but because they don’t seem to want to be alone with only themselves, who they seem afraid of or ashamed of at times.

The poems often show the simple thoughts going through the heads of the young. A girl that wants to ride with boys just because of their older age and their nice stereo, thoughts about puberty, the body, sex, etc. These poems often use slang, for instance, dope, dibs, jinx, you owe me a coke, etc, to show the immaturity and imagination of youth.

Bohince’s collection seems like a journey through different times and landscapes of her, or the speaker’s life, mixing childhood occurrences with feelings she has as an adult, with lovely and sometimes violent descriptions of her father’s farmhouse and property. Sometimes these times are specific, like a time she was swimming or a time her father was sleeping, other times the poems describe something more generic, like the feelings of the first day of hunting season which happens year after year.

Bohince’s poems are rich with adjectives. These adjectives don’t seem overdone, but necessary to the books flowing pace. The adjectives she uses are also often unusual and fresh, such as “kit foxes,” “gauzy ruin,” and “self-same branches” (6).

Bohince seems like she may use the act of hunting, killing deer, to compare to her father’s murder. She talks about some people seeing death for mere profit, and how they don’t think about the act of killing the deer but think of the profit of its parts; skull, ribs, spine, meat, etc… There are extremely beautiful images of nature throughout this collection. Bohince seems to notice the tiniest animals and plants around her and captures them into her words as if to not let them be forgotten to the world. Often though, she takes her skill at naturalistic images and turns them violent, showing that both nature and man have violent tendencies.