The 44th of July

by Jaswinder Bolina

This is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom; they are not executives or socialites. They are not the salt of the earth. Nor are they huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are the others of the everyday, the Americans no one sees. These are the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit. They can find Karachi on a map. They know a shortcut to Ikea. They can land a punchline. These are their poems.

In The 44th of July, Jaswinder Bolina offers bracing and often humorous reflections on American culture through the lens of an alienated outsider at a deliberately uncomfortable distance that puts the oddities of the culture on full display. Exploring the nuances of life in an America that doesn’t treat you as one of its own, yet whose benefits still touch your life, these exquisitely crafted poems sing in a kaleidoscopic collaging of language the mundane, yet surreal experience of being in between a cultural heritage of migration and poverty and daily life in a discriminatory yet prosperous nation. Both complicit in global capitalism and victims of the inequality that makes it possible, these are the Americans who are caught in a system with no clear place for them. Bolinas opens the space to include the excluded, bringing voice and embodied consciousness to experiences that are essential to Americanness, but get removed from view in the chasms between self and other, immigrant and citizen.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2019

About the author

Jaswinder Bolina is an American poet. He is the author of the chapbook The Tallest Building in America and a book of essays Of Color. His full-length poetry collections are Carrier Wave; Phantom Camera, which won the Green Rose Prize in Poetry from New Issues Poetry & Prose; and The 44th of July.

Reviews

[Alex Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jaswinder Bolina's unique wordsmithing shines in these poems—for better or for worse. He brings his own voice into the conversation about what America is, and it is refreshing for the most part. Some poems are way too complex and don't seem to have a greater meaning; others are inventive and bring new perspectives. I found I liked the poems the more I read, so maybe I just had to get used to the style. If you like thinking about the current anxieties about America and want a change of pace from newspaper articles and think pieces about it, you should consider this book. My favorites were "What We Call a Mountain in a Valley, They Call a Hill on the Mountain" and "The Tallest Building in America."

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baroque, musical, rangy, cosmopolitan, the lines of Jaswinder Bolina's The 44th of July elegantly and lyrically sprawl, even as they marvelously cavort from subject to subject, from colonialism to science to religion to television to politics to travel to xenophobia to drone warfare to love and loneliness and illness, and much more, radically informed politics and bleak comedy suffused throughout.

[Shawna (endemictoearth) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my 4th of July reading. It felt like the right thing to read in a time that feels very wrong. I'm rating this five stars, even though not every poem was 5 stars. The first poem, called Country, Western set the collection off with a bang, and the middle poem, Rubble Causeway, Rubble Clinic had me in tears.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kick-ass poetry! I'm impressed with the ability to weave a lot of strands in without losing the reader, and at a propulsive pace, too. Many of these poems rewarded a second and third reading, and I return it to the library knowing I may want to check it out again sometime to read them all again. Also, will have to read more by this author!

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and incendiary. The poems feel overfull to bursting, propelled by Bolina's ability to build tension and steam with his syntax. The 44th of July is brutally beautiful. A travelogue of someone exiled in his own country. Surveilled and surveyed. A target and a target market. Bolina's citizenship is held as both suspect and complicit, a position that allows for an almost clinical diagnosis of how cancerous our political moment is. As Bolina states, "I need to know the uncertain and the scarred also/ so I don't mist this for a place I'm welcome to linger in/ forever expecting an exquisite other to enter and mend me./ No, don't dally any longer. Open the door,/ doctor, and deliver your terrible news."

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bolina plays with words in a very satisfying way to me, using line breaks to create new meaning, intense alliteration to create crisp sounds. He’s clearly an expert at his craft.
I also found his exploration of America to be fruitfully probing. He uses many lenses: history, personal history, illness. But all result in a condemnation of colonialism and war-mongering, of xenophobia and racism. I may have to even give this another read sometime.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a little too political for me, but I think it's a needed insight into our lives/culture today.

[C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painfully topical this week

[Rob Hendricks]

[Omnidawn staff review] Jaswinder Bolina's citizen personae are wide awake and zinging. Sparkling with the energies of outrage with tenacious and sardonic whimsy, with wit and intelligence, with the language of protective force. His anecdodalists, too, seethe and glow with compassionate and hilarious anger. They come out swinging, packing their grotesqueries chock-a-block with the dreck and submerged violence of the USA's cultural life. One of them longs (from the bar) for an intervention by extraterrestrial messiahs with better taste in art. Another renounces all knowledge of the world's suffering in order to just be in love.

The voices of these poems have got the big picture on death. You might hear some of them accompanied by the daughters of the dead of Deraa, if they deign. Two poems in this book, for example, end with the trope of full-throated (full-hearted) song ("Supremacy" and "Second Variation on a Theme by César Vallejo"): enacting nightmare upon nightmare in first-person confrontational surges, brightly knowing speakers -- who seem sadly cognizant of the likelihood of facing off with some xenophobic, nationalistic, potentially fatal counterpart, some "grope of the king," "fitful, "fretful." They come face-forward in hardy good faith, compassionately aware of how worldviews are nurtured by layers of mediation ("cable modem... watercolor" and "scripture ruthless").

Jaswinder Bolina's quirky voicers step forward, turning the tables, blotto with bright animus, in a great variety of ways in this exceptional book of poems. All of these poems sing (and many sear) sometimes looking back from the future embracingly, even upon the great many possible permutations of death to come, be it violent or mundane. May the daughters, if it please them to, sing. Even "Jaswinder Bolina" is alive amongst these deadly funny, acrobatic, searching, wildly imaginative, defiant poems, as one of a host of sharp and singular observers, grounded in the painful, nutty, ugly particulars of time and place.