Severalty
Poems
About gardening, nature, medical trauma, and motherhood, the poems of Laura Da’s Severalty reflect on what happens when people are severed from their heritage and identity.
Severalty, a synonym for separateness, appears to mark distinctness: the separation of a city into parts, the classification of plant species, and the sundering of Native American people from their ancestral lands. Da’s own body experiences a severalty too, the kind for which “There is no resolution”: she awaits a life-saving organ transplant, knowing her body might fight the intrusion, as “The system is designed for integrity.”
Da’ mourns the losses her Shawnee ancestors experienced—of lands, languages, and identities. Still, she tends to her heritage as she tends to her garden: “A strain of heirloom corn / roughly translates to the word / sustainer—worlds / that germinate inside such a word: / wild horses, lilting shadows / glimpsed in the elbows of the hills / like opaque flags of prayer.”
Their language lyrical, some poems utilize short, unstructured lines with stark imagery to punctuate their revelations. Others are prose poems, as with “Passing the Frontier,” a series of full paragraphs narrating the US government’s late 1800s actions to steal land from Native Americans. Da’ reflects on these breakages: “Allotment created frontiers. The frontier of stolen land, stolen children, stolen memories. People are the storytellers, but the land is the memory palace.”
Still, Da’ locates beauty in all, from the lowliest seed to the operating table. In “Painterly,” she observes how “A nurse plotted / bleach-soaked / bandages on the side table, / one after another,” determined to fix her observations of these minute details “if it was the last thing / I ever did.”
A seductive poetry collection, Severalty blurs the lines between humans and their environments.
Reviewed by
Jeana Jorgensen
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
