What He Did In Solitary: Poems to carry you through a pandemic

My body is a pawprint in the snow,
My memory, a snowman in the spring,
A little time, and then it's time to go,

So sing, my momentary Snowman, sing.

These lines appear in "Letters to Myself in My Next Incarnation," a poem cycle in Amit Majmudar's new collection What He Did in Solitary, a collection much concerned with the role of the poet and his reasons for writing. Majmudar's poems beg to be read multiple times in bulk and separately as their impact builds over time, word-plays and startling metaphors sparking pleasure on every page (jellyfish as "Ghost truffle / unruffled / by rough weather") as the poet shapes images into a variety of forms, from villanelles to ghazals to a combination sonnet and ghazal he calls a sonzal, plus free verse, prose poems, and list poems, including the title poem and and another in the form of a kill list and a helpful "Shopping List for the Apocalypse" that includes "Lice combs to harvest protein."

Many poems deal with the problem of mortality, the challenge of creating a meaningful life when meaning seems so quick to cease. "Letters to Myself in My Next Incarnation," for instance, asks

         Why do we
Write anything
If not to pass along a valediction
From the echo
Whose echo we are.

Here, the poet inhabits the liminal space connecting those whose genes he carries and those he will engender, whom he addresses as

My future homonym,
My future human
Meme, my futile name's

Skull-shucked
Plucked-spleen picked-clean
Mummified remains...

But the poet who balances between the demands of past and future finds that the very act of seeking immortality leads to dissolution:

To find a seeker's pleasure
in self-erasure

the mountaineer must wish
herself to mist.

Like his previous collection, Dothead, Majmudar wrestles with the difficulties posed by his hyphenated identity. As a native Ohioan born to South Asian parents, the poet channels childhood conflicts into poems buzzing with energy and life and complex emotions; in "Chillicothe Apostrophe," for instance, he offers a joyful paean to his flawed but beloved native state ("O heart shape, O hardship, / Ohio, O home"), and in "Air Jordans" he recalls the sense of empowerment provided by a new pair of shoes:

As if the Gods had called me
to jump, boy, jump, boy,
one arm up, one arm
down, like the overreacher
on my sneakers shooting
his body past the hoop
of the horizon.

But the boy seeking such empowerment too often feels put-upon, as in the poem "Bully," which evokes a desire for revenge before making a sudden shift to horrifying violence. Here, Majmudar shows how marginalization and oppression act on many levels and sometimes come creeping in when least expected.

Several poems deal eloquently with the marginalization of the ethnic Other, including his lauded poem "The Beard," in which the poet's resemblance to a terrorist cause others' fears to mold him into an unfamiliar monster. "Invasive Species" imagines us all as foreigners, as varieties of kudzu or Asian carp setting down roots in new places:

             We flower where we flower,
flinging roots like ropes from runaway
hot-air balloons to snag a city's skyline.

At several points, though, he longs for an escape from double consciousness, wishing his poems could be read without reference to his ethnicity. In "How Do I Say That, Where Is That From," he wishes for "a white name, / But not too white," a name he calls a "Bleachonym":

White as a wall
              On which the art
Is noticed from
              The very start.

Majmudar's art celebrates family connections and disconnections: a grandfather who married a hurricane, an uncle who mastered metamorphosis, couples who find love in a pile of warm laundry, suffering souls who stick together through grief and pain and loss. If love is a cat's cradle strung between fragile fingers, says the poet, then

            The cat
            in my creche
is your name

            on my breath.      

In these poems, love is as fleeting as breath but also as essential; transience is everywhere, but these poems provide a square meal that nourishes and warms and feels much more permanent than a melting pawprint in the snow. So sing, my momentary snowman, sing.