With lacerating honesty, technical mastery, and abiding compassion, Made to Explode offers volatile poems for our volatile times. In her fourth collection, acclaimed poet Sandra Beasley interrogates the landscapes of her life in decisive, fearless, and precise poems that fuse intimacy and intensity. She probes memories of growing up in Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson’s shadow, where liberal affluence obscured and perpetuated racist aggressions, but where the poet was simultaneously steeped in the cultural traditions of the American South. Her home in Washington, DC, inspires prose poems documenting and critiquing our capital’s institutions and monuments. In these poems, Ruth Bader Ginsberg shows up at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre’s show of Kiss Me Kate ; Albert Einstein is memorialized on Constitution Avenue, yet was denied clearance for the Manhattan Project; as temperatures cool, a rain of spiders drops from the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. A stirring suite explores Beasley’s affiliation with the disability community and her frustration with the ways society codes disability as inferiority. Quintessentially American and painfully timely, these poems examine legacies of racism and whiteness, the shadow of monuments to a world we are unmaking, and the privileges the poet is working to untangle. Made to Explode boldly reckons with Beasley’s roots and seeks out resonance in society writ large. 16-page black-and-white insert
Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton. Her debut book, Theories of Falling, was selected by Marie Howe as the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2008). Her poetry has been featured in the Best American Poetry 2010, and her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post Magazine. In July, Crown will publish Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life, a memoir and cultural history of food allergies. When not traveling for readings and residencies, Beasley lives in Washington, DC, where she serves on the faculty of the Writer's Center.
I don't usually read books of poetry, but this one knocked me off my socks. As only an accomplished poet can, Sandra Beasley recounts episodes of a coming of age of a woman growing up in Virginia and becoming aware of a wider world, then later as a resident of DC. There are poems that I returned to even after reading an hour or so before, that broke my heart. Very few smiles here. And who can't relate to visits at fast food restaurants.
Really interesting and enjoyable collection. As a DC lover and longtime DC resident, I really enjoyed the section on DC. But there were many poems that will stay with me throughout the collection- most of all the poem Lazarus, which an impressive mix of humor and the meaning of life.
Jefferson planted over a thousand trees in the South Orchard—eighteen varieties of apple, six apricot, four nectarine, and thirty-eight types of peach. Lemon Cling. Heath Cling. Indian Blood Cling. Vaga Loggia. Breast of Venus, which Jefferson accounted for as the “teat peach”— interlopers mistaken as indigenous. Each cleft globe was a luxury, yet so abundant they were sliced, chipped, boiled, brandied, fried, sun-dried, and extras fed to the hogs.
My first wish is that the labourers may be well treated, the Master wrote. He created a system for tipping. Once, James Hemings was whipped three times over before the sun had set behind Brown’s Mountain.
When Jefferson traveled to Paris in 1784, he took Sally and her brother— James, who learned the language, who trained at pasta and pastry, paid four dollars per month to serve as chef de cuisine to the Minister to France. James, who had to be coaxed to leave a country where, in 1789, slavery had been abolished.
I hereby do promise & declare until he shall have taught such person as I shall place under him for that purpose to be a good cook, this previous condition being performed, he shall thereupon be made free . . . “For that purpose”: their brother, Robert.
In 1796, James was freed. In 1801, James killed himself. In 1802, Robert debuted macaroni pie on the menu for Jefferson’s state dinner. In 1824, a recipe layering pasta, cheese, and butter appears in The Virginia Housewife: Or, Methodical Cook, alongside Mrs. Mary Randolph’s marmalade that specifies a pound of West Indies sugar to two pounds of peaches—“yellow ones make the prettiest”—and a hard chop until flesh gives away to transparent pulp, chilled to a jelly.
If one was accused of stealing or eating beyond one’s share the grill was secured over the mouth. This was considered the kind muzzle. The unkind one settled an iron bit over the tongue.
The groundskeepers knew we’d come with our wreath to lay at Jefferson’s grave, walking Monticello’s grass at misted dawn, half-drunk and laughing. We came every year. There are two types of peaches: one to which the stone clings, shredding to wet threads, and another allowed to lift clean.
“Freestone,” they call those peaches— that most popular variety, the White Lady.
I will admit, the author is definitely smarter than me with references to experiences I both haven't had and am ignorant to...both of which meaning I will lack the honor of the full beauty of the book, but her writing is undeniably beautiful, with the occasional dash of humor that makes her shine.
The poetry shelves in my library are fairly diverse and eclectic. On them are poets whom I cherish and want to return to again and again: Fernando Pessoa, Robert Desnos, Sylvia Plath, Dante, Robinson Jeffers, Karoline von Günderrode… Theirs are what I call “forever books,” books I want to be with me always. These books have a new neighbor on my poetry shelves: Sandra Beasley’s “Made To Explode.” First it is a book of sheer beauty: beauty of words and sounds and images and feelings – feelings about love, longing, nostalgia, and perhaps most important, about being a woman. (The concluding stanza of “Death By Chocolate” is devastating: “I get you, women who did not grow up aspiring to be a plot device… We’re over it. Our mouths have more to say.”)
“Made To Explode” dreams its own unique reality and invites the reader to do the same. Some of Beasley’s images may seem surrealistic at first – spiders dropping at midnight to the cold stone floor of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, for example – only they are not. They are like breathtaking photographs taken by a brilliant photographer who knows exactly how to frame the image, where to set the focus, and most important, when to push the shutter. The ability to weave and juxtapose such images and events isolated and abstracted from experience is one of Sandra Beasley’s greatest gifts, and one of the most exhilarating things about this book.
Is this a somber book, an elegiac reflection on places from the poet’s childhood and youth redolent with personal memories? Not at all. Sandra Beasely’s topsy-turvy wit continues to creep up on the reader unexpectedly, inviting smiles and even the occasional chuckle.
“Made To Explode” is so rich that as soon as I received it I read it through three times, and with each reading discovered a new favorite. First was “Intersectionality,” a geometry of morals, passions and logic. Next there was “Pigs In Space,” in which tacos, tortillas and kimchi make conceptual guest appearances on the moon. Then “The Vow,” with its crackling diction and a concluding line that brought tears to my eyes. (Read the poem and let me know if you agree with me.) And then. . . “Lazarus,” for the moment my favorite poem in the volume, and another with a devastating final line that leaves one thinking long after the book is back on its shelf.
“Someone always lets the earthquake out,” Sandra Beasley writes in the prose-poem “Weak Ocean,” and in the case of “Made to Explode” that someone is she. This is a truly momentous collection, superbly crafted and tremendously enjoyable to read. “Made to Explode” is not only a five star book. It is a must.
American Rome Marion “Shepilov” Barry, Jr. (1936-2014)
Marionberry: jams of Washington state. I thought they were mocking this city. Take a mayor and boil his sugar down- spoon-spreadable, sweet. We take presidents and run them in a game’s fourth-inning stretch. We take Bullets and turn them to Sea Dogs. Do you remember that ballot? Sea Dogs Dragons Stallions Express. The Washington Wizards was no more or less of a stretch. We wave gavels like wands in this city. We’re the small town in which a president can plant some roses. Each time I sit down to try and say goodbye, all I write down is Dear City. My neighbor walks his dogs past a monument to a president’s terrier, forever bronzed. Washington has no J Street, no Z, yet the city maps attend to fifty states and a stretch
of five blocks NE Metro track—a stretch named Puerto Rico Avenue. Bow down to the unmapped names: Chocolate City, Simple City. Ben serves up chili dogs through a riot, and Walter Washington is the first and last time a president
picks our mayor. The truth is, presidents come and go, four or eight years at a stretch. Barry said, I’m yours for life, Washington; Emperor Marion, who could get down with Chuck Brown. Later, reporters will dog his Bitch set me up, his graft. Dear City, will you let me claim you as my city? To love you is to defy precedent. Your quadrants hustle like a pack of dogs around the hydrant Capitol. They stretch and paw, they yap and will not settle down. Traffic: the berry to Washington’s jam. For city miles, Barry’s motorcade stretched. We laid him among vice presidents, down where the dogs seek congress in Washington.
Death by Chocolate
A man wants my take on his novel where a wife dies with a peanut in her mouth after we’ve met her husband, in the act with his secretary in the passenger seat of a late-life convertible. A man wants my take on his novel where the husband’s marital issues are solved by her anaphylactic collapse after he serves her takeout spiked with a cashew, and for another 300 pages he wonders, Was it an accident? Or did I know? Somewhere out there a man is writing a novel about a chef with a taste for adding shrimp paste to curry and his unsuspecting shellfish-allergic wife, and I will be asked for my take on it. I have been offered dozens of takes on my own death. Suggestions abound. Death by ice cream. Death by cake. Death by cucumber, though that would take a while; perhaps gazpacho as a shortcut. Death by mango. Death by Spanish omelette. Death by dairy, an abstraction sexy to someone who has never side-eyed cream brought out slopping toward the coffee; who has never felt histamine’s palm at her throat, who says Cheese makes life worth living. These wives! I get you, women who did not grow up aspiring to be a plot device. We almost die a lot. Or: we die a lot, almost. We’re over it. Our mouths have more to say.
WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH After Roland Barthes
Barthes withholds this image from Camera Lucida—
Henriette, the five-year-old who grows up to be his mother, her hands on her hips. He couldn’t bear that our gaze might find her
ordinary, as one might find this snapshot of my grandparents arriving in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Her precise handwriting on the back declares their “America the Beautiful” tour. Grandma Jean’s jaunty scarf, Carl in his crisp white shirt— 1990. In 1991,
I pick up the calendar she kept by her reading chair. Her neat script fills the square of January 22: Carl died. Life is over.
The woman in green jacket and green skirt, full throttle, smiles toward the camera
as she rounds the corner of the terminal, purse under one arm and blue carry-on under the other.
Because this photograph is not mine to keep, I take a photograph of it.
Barthes says I am now operator and referent, sliver of thumb and palm visibly cradling Kodak print.
The rest of January 1991 stays blank.
February, blank. March, bare. But then a church meeting is scheduled. She pencils in a lunch. Yes, she will come to the recital.
Her cursive wakens the days. Even in winter, the garden can call itself to bloom.
For National Poetry month -- and just because I like the writing of Sandra Beasley-- I bought her new collection MADE TO EXPLODE, and I did something I rarely do with poetry, I read the entire collection all at once. It just drew me right in. Her topics can be tough -- about whiteness, about Emmett Till-- but also about chocolate, Chagall, a possessive cat, Bass Pro Shops.
My favorite works were in a section of prose poems -- and here I might be biased as someone who usually reads fiction and who lives in the DC area. "Kiss Me" about Ruth Bader Ginsburg imagined at the musical "Kiss Me Kate" leads perfectly into a series of prose poems about monuments at midnight that were just so inventive that I want to go visit the Jefferson memorial and Lincoln memorial and others in the District of Columbia at midnight. I think this should be a tour with the poet!
"Truth is, I've tried odder routes to ecstasy," she writes in delightful "Lazarus." However, I found my odd route to ecstasy here in these poems.
Yes, these poems are made to explode -- it's a collection so worth owning. I think I'm going to return to it often.
I was very close to rating this a three but the final section raised my opinion drastically. While I still feel some earlier poems in the collection are somewhat inaccessible to those who might lack the right cultural knowledge of the south, I do believe many of them still hold important meaning for those willing to dig for it. Beasley's imagery consistently paints a portrait of the poem very well, and her golden shovel poems are certainly the highlights of the collection.
The overarching theme felt loose and unclear throughout most of the first three quarters of the book, but the final section wrapped it all up in a way that enhances a second reading of some of the earlier pieces. I was hesitant at first, but I'm glad I stuck with it through its incredibly artistic end.
Beasley is an amazing poet, there's not doubt about that. She covers a broad number of topics, often with a historical bent, in a beautiful and thought-provoking way. Be that as it may, this book of poems is quite centered around food, which is not mentioned at all in the description of the copy I purchased. If you're not really into food/eating imagery, or if you're an ethical vegan/vegetarian, this may not be the book for you.
This is such a smart, taut collection, clearly a poet at the top of her game. This collection explores the politics and pleasure of food as its throughline, but diverges in marvelous ways throughout as the speaker also contemplates the US capitol and its monuments, family, history, love, etc. The stuff of poems. And such delicious ones.
A gorgeous volume. I had read many of these pieces as they were published, but seeing them side by side was electric. I was particularly drawn to her portrait of Washington, DC. It is, as always, a great privilege to watch Beasley’s poetic mind at work in these pages.
There are only so many things that you can say about Beasley, but I think what is most interesting is that given her severe food allegeries, she might be the best nonfood writer writing about food in American right now. Poems about something I try to do three times a day?! Amazing.
There are some take-your-breath-away beautiful poems in here, but I'm not in the right headspace to appreciate them. I'll try coming back to them when the school year ends!
A collection of poems that is very DC-centric (which I liked!)
from Black Death Spectacle: "Ask the poet what gets colored in. / Ask the poet what gets colored in a / red / room. / Ask the poet who sits in a red room, drinking."
from American Rome: "Marrionberry: jams of Washington / state. I thought they were mocking this city. / Take a mayor and boil his sugar down -- / spoon-spreadable, sweet. We take presidents / and run them in a game's fourth-inning stretch. / We take Bullets and turn them into Sea Dogs."
from Death by Chocolate: "These wives! I get you, women who / did not grow up aspiring to be a plot device. / We almost die a lot. Or: we die a lot, / almost. We're over it. Our mouths have more to say."