Janice Greenwood

I wish I had been able to read Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual by Luvvie Ajayi Jones a year ago, when this whole COVID-19 pandemic was just getting started, and when I found myself trying to muster up the courage to post my first essay on this blog. Instead, in March and April, as everything around the world shut down, and clients called to let me know work had dried up, I found myself sitting in front of my computer, realizing that if a global pandemic that threatened to kill us all wasn’t going to finally get me to be brave enough to start putting my own writing out into the world in a meaningful and risky way, nothing was going to move me to do so. So I sat in front of my computer in March, and then for most of April, still doing absolutely nothing, still unmoved. I mostly took baths and read books about strategic planning, because what better way to procrastinate than to think about strategic planning?

But by mid-April, I’d had enough, and set off to do the scariest thing I’ve ever done (and I’ve done some scary and sometimes stupid things in my life—like free climb 700-foot cliffs, or live in a tent in tornado country, or paddle out into the channel at Waimea Bay on a 15-foot day). And so, in April, when the lockdown had been going on just long enough to look like it wasn’t going to end anytime soon, and it looked like there was a distinct real possibility that we might all die or come close to dying, I pushed “publish” on my first essay, and tried to keep in mind all the other times I’ve come out okay by the skin of my teeth.

The best thing possible happened, which is that nothing happened. I published another essay. Nothing happened for a long time.

Ajayi Jones writes: “One of the things I’ve learned in my journey is how much fear could have stopped me at any moment from doing the thing that changed my life. Or doing the thing that led to me meeting the right person. Or doing the thing that allowed someone else to do the thing that changed their life.”

Nothing happened and I thought about stopping. In fact, I did stop a few times, mostly to just wallow on the couch, watch Outbreak (again), and contemplate humanity’s collective doom. But something kept drawing me back to this place. I don’t think a self-help book would have saved me from my own self-doubt, but I think that Professional Troublemaker: The Fear Fighter Manual might have at least helped me realize that self-doubt could potentially be a temporary condition.

Jones divides her book into three sections: be, say, and do. In her “Be” section she argues that “Being fully ourselves is necessary for us because it serves as a grounding force.” But self-knowledge is perhaps the most difficult of all forms of knowledge to attain, and I’d argue that courageous action in itself can often be the instructive force that leads to self-knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes we need to be brave to learn who we are.

Ajayi Jones isn’t a big philosopher, though, and I’m okay with that. I don’t like philisophy that much anyway.

Courage involves understanding what the risks are, and then going and doing it anyway, with the willingness to learn and adjust from the results and failures. Ajayi Jones’s advice isn’t bad. I’d just qualify it a bit. I DO think it is important that a person have some modicum of knowledge, balance, and skill before going out and braving something new. For example, before starting a blog, a new writer would be wise to take a writing class or two and get some serious feedback on their writing first. And most people would be wise to get some training before trying sky diving or rock climbing for the first time.

One of my favorite moments in Professional Troublemaker was when Ajayi Jones taught me how to write a Yoruba oríkì poem, which is basically a self-affirming chant that connects one to the ancestors and to one’s essential self.

I spent a good hour in the bath writing my oríkì and was pleased with the outcome: “Janice Elizabeth of house Greenwood. First of her name. Priestess of poetry. Writer and reader of books. Huntress of swells. Friend of sea turtles and mermaid of the Ala Wai Townhouse.”

Still, one of the weaknesses of the book’s early section is its assumption that self-knowledge comes easily. For example, while I can agree with Ajayi Jones that it’s useful to have articulated your own core values before you go out there trying to put on a brave face to the world or before you try to stand up for anything, understanding yourself can be a lifelong project. I spent two years working on trying to figure out my “core values;” I’d still call it a work in progress, but I’m glad I haven’t let that stop me from doing brave things. Maybe some of us know ourselves better than others. And maybe some of us take time.

Professional Troublemaker doesn’t necessarily introduce any radically new ideas into the world, but it presents them from an original perspective, and isn’t that what we ask writers to do for us? For example, Ajayi Jones taught me how to write an oríkì, so I should shut my mouth.

Ajayi Jones’s Professional Troublemaker covers ground that has been covered before. For example, Jen Sincero’s You are a Badass might be an easy comparison. But, I like Ajayi Jones’s book better, and if someone were choosing between the two, I’d choose Professional Troublemaker. For one, Ajayi Jones flavors her lessons with loving and humorous anecdotes from Yoruba culture, which makes the book refreshing. (This makes me wish more Black women wrote self-help books. I think the world would be a better place.) Secondly, Ajayi Jones doesn’t expect her readers to just manifest their success out of thin air. The book comes from a writer who understands hard work.

Her chapter, “Dream Audaciously,” encourages her readers to expect more from the world and themselves, while acknowledging that for some readers, getting to that more might be harder, especially if they are not “(like millions of white men) [who] benefit from being constantly centered, elevated, and catered to.” I think the strongest lesson that can be taken from Ajayi Jones’s book is to dream bigger and to dare greater, even in the face of adversity. She writes of the oft-posted quote (which I haven’t come across because I’m not so into the social media landscape) which goes: “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” We know it to be true, but it bears repeating.

Jones’s book is also refreshing in that it doesn’t assume that everyone has the privilege or the financial stability to take all her advice at once. Jones also doesn’t write those readers off. Instead, she offers readers a road map forward and meets them where they are. I love that this book doesn’t cater to the illusion of overnight success and it doesn’t come from the voice of a person who started on third base in life and made it home–and is now trying to tell rookies how to hit home runs.

Ajayi Jones’s Professional Troublemaker gave me hope, especially because she’s willing to share that her success didn’t happen overnight. Putting anything out into the world can feel scary and hopeless, but others have done it too and survived. Not only survived, thrived.

And so, since the pandemic started, I’ve been, intermittently at first, and now more regularly, writing my essays and criticism, and keeping up with my own public-facing work. At first, nothing happened. And then small things started to happen. People wrote me little notes of encouragement. I got to write a piece I cared deeply about for Honolulu Magazine.  

Overnight success didn’t come, but I like this slow climb better. I think about how I might have started this blog ten years ago and I’d be so much further along, but courage takes time, and I’m just grateful I started at all.  

I’ve moved away from feeling abject terror every time I hit publish, to feeling some degree of excitement (though sometimes the feeling excitement includes the feeling of wanting to vomit in my mouth). Everything I write is still never good enough, but it is also enough, and I know it will get better.

Ajayi Jones started her own blog in 2006. Ten years later, she published her first New York Times bestselling book. Ten years. She worked her ass off. I’ve only been at it for a year. I have a long way to go. I’m not planning on stopping any time soon. New York Times bestseller’s list better have a blank space waiting for me in 2030.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

How Far You Have Come by Morgan Harper Nichols doesn’t go far enough.

There’s something that attracts us all to writing and art that promises the open road. The literature of travel is as American as rest stops, McDonald’s hamburgers, Coca-Cola, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (It’s no surprise that Nomadland won the Oscar; we love the allure of the highway, its promise of freedom). Morgan Harper Nichols, in How Far You Have Come brings all the anticipation of a family road trip to the opening sections of her book, reminding us that there is a “longstanding literary tradition of looking to the natural world to communicate our emotional and spiritual experiences.” She says she has drawn her inspiration from her childhood family road trips, and in her introduction she explains how the journey has a way of “shaping us and awakening us.” Nichols had me sold and eager to read on.

What followed was somewhat disappointing. Nichols is an Instagram poet. And much of the poetry on offer here is as bland as the empty silos one passes while driving through the prairies of South Dakota. I could play poetry cliché bingo on just the first few poems alone: “memory,” “dreams,” “doubts,” “faithful path,” “head west:” BINGO! Don’t take those words and make a new poem, I dare you.

The thing about all this is that Nichols has some poetic and literary talent. It’s just buried in a book that’s mostly made up of content that is better suited for the ephemeral Instagram post.  In a book where the reader isn’t just mindlessly scrolling along, Nichols’s work often falls flat. The reader expects the author to shape the experience, but there is no shape to the experience of reading How Far You Have Come. An hour into her book I felt the same general ennui I feel when I’ve spent too long on Instagram.

I wanted to read Nichols’s line, the “many roads / we do not take” generously. Perhaps it had been influenced by Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken?” But the similarities and influence ends there, and I don’t see much else of Frost in this work, so the argument falls apart, like a summer rainstorm on the prairie that looms and then sometimes dissolves with sunshine or tornado.

I found myself relieved when Nichols presented the image of an orange barricade in one poem. It came as a relief, because, for a book that promises the open road, there was so much early navel gazing the speaker might have well as been in line at a Wal-Mart when she wrote the book.

I quietly begged Nichols to give me more orange barricades. She did not.

I don’t quite understand how an “arctic sky” made it into a section on “Georgia,” but perhaps “arctic sky” was meant to be read metaphorically.

All this makes me sad.

I found something of a kindred spirit in Nichols. When I was a child, my family would take elaborate road trips every summer, driving thousands of miles with the National Parks as our destination. In a prose section that arrives abruptly in the book, Nichols writes about the impatient excitement a child feels before the family hits the road, and I found myself nodding along, and remembering driving at night through Jupiter, Florida, the stars so close overhead I imagined our van had indeed blasted through the troposphere and out into outer space. My brother and I convinced our baby brother that we had indeed gone to Jupiter, and he cried.

I remember hikes in the clouds in the Great Smoky Mountains, bears digging through garbage cans at the top of mountains, and the Joyce Kilmer tree, where my dad taught me that poetry was important on a day I only wanted to be in Gatlinburg buying Beanie Babies.

We slept through the prairies and woke up at Dinosaur National Monument—from the 90s to the Jurassic in 24 hours. I got a stomach virus at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, where I was so sick, I puked over the fence into the canyon below. My memories of Hollywood are hazy. I know I cried hysterically when I finally met Mickey Mouse in Disney Land. My parents should have saved the little money they had and taken us to the beach instead. I remember Old Faithful, and when I returned as an adult years later, I found myself moved to tears to see it still faithfully doing its thing.

Travel can indeed be transformative. My childhood travels left a mark on me that is only clear now, some twenty years and more later. Our parents teach us what to value based on their actions. When my parents maxed out their credit cards every summer to drive me and my brothers to the forest, they were teaching my brothers and me something, something about the importance of the natural world, something about privileging experience above material possessions. We weren’t rich. We were poor, by many standards—my parents often slept in the living room when we were growing up, right next to the dining room table, because we never had enough rooms. But my parents put a value on taking us to see natural places, on taking us on hikes that would push us physically and mentally, on showing us other cultures, and other ways of living, as if to help us understand that there were possibilities beyond our little apartment in Miami, Florida, beyond the mallrat lives of our friends, beyond the movies and television version of America. In those travels, I saw possibilities for myself that only came to fruition years later when I found myself living out of a van, climbing cliffs, surfing waves, doing my thing, unafraid as my parents had been when they’d load up the van with three kids and the last pennies in their bank account.  

The best moments in Nichols’s How Far You Have Come are the places where Nichols leaves poetry behind and writes in prose. Nichols finds beauty in watching the scene of the Atlanta Olympics pass by from her car window. Her observations are good: “What a gift it is to be inconvenienced,” she writes, noting that she might not have seen the Olympic torch had her parents not taken the detour. “I almost missed this scene of beauty because I was too busy racing toward the next one.”

I was disappointed when the book shifted back to bad poetry.

***

When I was in high school, I started taking poetry seriously. While reading Nichols, I was reminded me of an old composition notebook of poetry I had kept when I was a teen. I had written in it on one of the last road trips my family took together before I left home for college.

On the trip, I also carried with me one book of poetry, Stephen Dunn’s Different Hours.

I didn’t really know where to start when it came to reading contemporary poetry, and my first thought was to read all the recent Pulitzer Prize-winners—which I still think is a good plan for any contemporary young poet seriously contemplating a career in poetry, or seriously thinking about publishing a poetry book. This is not because I think Pulitzer Prize winners are all inherently good, but because I feel the prize winners can give young poets a feel for the pulse of poetry in America.

I flip through that notebook now. How long ago it was. We drove from Miami, Florida to Roanoke, Virginia. I don’t remember Roanoke, Virginia at all, but I remember sitting in the back seat of the van, writing.

One of the first poems I wrote in that composition book is called “Big Sky.” It goes: “Today we escape the small town / where church steeples point heavenward / thin white antennae probing / for intelligent life up there,/ trying to poke God in the eye.”

It relieves me to see that my early poetic sensibilities were good, if only half-formed.

Here’s another: “Angels are clichés. / Tonight I’ll write about the murderer / who lurks invisible / behind small-town windows.” I revised that poem to death in the dozen composition book pages that follow, but if I could go back to that state of mind, I’d be a better poet today.

I was 17 years old.

If Instagram existed back then, would I have become an Instagram poet? Maybe an Instagram poet for the Goth kids.

Did we make it to Colorado? I ripped out several pages in the notebook. (I still have this tendency. When learning how to paint last year, I ripped out the pages in my sketchbook I didn’t like, too.)

Here’s another: “Last Chance” it goes: “Last Chance, Colorado, / Another American town / where no one denies / the coming of death, like Jesus.”

I could also be political back then. In “Fighting the Killer” I wrote about how Elmo hugged Big Bird on public television so that the kids wouldn’t become high school killers. These were the days after Columbine, when high school shootings were still a new thing. I observed the way civilization encroached upon the natural world: “pavement slices scars into mountain forests.”

Mysteriously, many of these poems have been crossed out with a purple Crayola marker.

On that trip, my dad almost got struck by lightning, giving birth to my lifelong phobia of thunderstorms. I wrote: “Daddy saw God / when the lightning almost hit him, / but like death, we won’t talk about it.” We didn’t talk about it.

***

I return to Nichols’s poetry. I fear many of these poems were written while literally staring at an Atlas. It feels there are more vivid poems of maps than poems of actual places.

She writes: “When you look at the map / and trace your fingers over / hundreds of routes / you will find no finish line” and later “There are over / a hundred million lakes / on this map.”

This is her better stuff. At least there is evidence of a poet recording her world as she sees it, even if she’s only really looking at a map. I wish Nichols did more of this, rather than slipping into the navel gazing vagueness of “you trust that there is a way forward.”

And yet, there are some poems here better than others. A good edit and more prose might have saved How Far You Have Come, and taken it further. The abstract paintings that seem to want to become floral representations serve as backgrounds to gems like: “I will not let / the pulse / of the clock / dictate the / pulse of / my life.”

And her prose has some moments of luminosity: “Nature doesn’t speak in highway signs or sonnets. And I realized I didn’t have to either.” Maybe nature is a better essayist, too. I’m not sure.

Nichols observes that we can go back in time when we cross a state line.

***

I write this essay from Honolulu, Hawai’i. We are always further back in time than everyone else. It’s only four o clock here. Back in New York, it’s ten p.m. It’s seven on the west coast. I open my teen notebook and go back further.

“America at 70 Miles Per Hour: A woman in a Mercedes smokes her last cigarette.”

The vacation ended. We returned home. I wrote a poem called “Cleanliness.”

“My grandmother would scrape away the dirty marks / on her white ceramic tiles / with a plastic cake knife. / An arsenal of medicines, disinfectants, and alcohol-based wildflowers / made her eyes red. / She sacrificed her Sunday service / to listen to me cry.”

***

Youthful poetry is uneven. It needs a mature eye or editor to draw it out. Nichols has some good lines, like “I am learning to trust / light’s song / here in the dust.”

Nichols writes about walking on the shoreline in Alabama in beautiful prose. “I watched all the footprints of where I’d been, knowing that I could walk for miles, and by the time I made it back around to where I’d started, the water would have washed away all memory of me.” The idea is so good, she repeats it again later.  

Her minimalist paintings are often quite stunning, especially the early ones in the Mississippi section of her book.

Sadly, Nichols’s How Far You Have Come is another example of a youthful poet pushing out work too quickly, without really taking the time to understand what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Yet, I always found myself relieved when Nichols returned to prose. She is a prose writer at heart. It is in the expansiveness of prose that she does her best work. While driving through Mississippi, Nichols asks her mom when they’ll reach the Mississippi river, and she imagines the children of freed slaves traveling into the night, not knowing when they’ll get there.  

There are brief moments when the poetry, pressed close to the stronger prose, vibrates with more life. I wish the poet had spent more time developing this.

The problem with How Far You Have Come is that it doesn’t go far enough. This artist, poet, and writer doesn’t know her own strengths well enough to develop this work sufficiently to make it a fully-formed book. She isn’t able to weed out the weaker cartoony artwork that feels like it was sketched out on Adobe from the transcendently fine art that seems to form half-abstracted cityscapes in pitch black night. This is a poet unable to edit down her poetry to its essence (“think of the Kallima butterfly/ folding her wings to resemble a leaf”). This is a poet unable to differentiate between her Kallima butterflies and the one-off jottings she posts on Instagram. And she’s unable to extend the prose into an interwoven theme. It’s half formed. It’s unfortunate. But maybe the next book will be better.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

The words in Clarity & Connection, Yung Pueblo’s second poetry book, often began as content on his widely popular Instagram account. His words are less poetry than popular self-help truisms, and he joins a growing number self-help content creators. Many of these content writers have qualifications: they are lawyers or psychologists sharing their expertise in a popular format. In fact, as a creator of legal content writing, I see these creators as offering new insight into how the medium of Instagram can be used to reach a wider audience. One example is Erika Kullberg (@erikankullberg), a corporate lawyer with 4.3 million Instagram followers who gives pretty good advice on how to get airline companies to pay for your delayed bags. Dr. Nicole LePera (@the.holistic.psychologist) is a psychologist with 6.1 million followers who writes about how attachment styles can impact your current relationships.

Yet, the practitioners of self-help poetry are seldom psychologists or therapists, and seldom have professional training as social workers. They are often young.

This is not to say that youth doesn’t have its wisdom. After all, Taylor Swift knew everything she needed to know when she was 16, and can now spend the rest of her career re-recording her teenage songs to perfection. She’ll be fine and so will we.

The dangers of writing self-help content or offering forth wisdom too early in your expertise is that it is all too easy to be vague, all too convenient to render truth in platitudes. What makes the best poetry helpful is the ruthlessness of its specificity. I think here of Sylvia Plath’s collected poems and Dante Alighieri’s rigorous and specific assessment of all the ways love can go wrong in the Divine Comedy. Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poems offer a Buddhist perspective, but are so specific that the philosophy shimmers beneath, a philosophy of doing, not preaching.

In Clarity & Connection, there is some clarity and some connection, but not a great deal of specificity. Philosophy overtakes the poetry, leaving little room for poetic expression. There’s no subtlety.

Pueblo writes: “the biggest shift in your life happens when you go inward… with time, intention, and good healing practices, / the past loses its power over your life.”

What exactly are these “good healing practices?” What exactly does “inward” bring?

The poems that follow don’t offer much of an answer. We are reminded to “help people, but have boundaries.” Lest we fear we are falling into our old patterns, Pueblo offers the sage advice that “repeating the past / is a sign of progress.”

At worst, self-help spirals into the icy circle of hell that is pure cliché, and Pueblo’s poetry is often a frozen lake of these. Pueblo writes straight-faced about “the fruits of your labor” having an “immensely positive / impact on your life.” And later Pueblo writes: “we do not need to reinvent the wheel.” Poetry is the antithesis of cliché; it’s disappointing to see so much of it here.  

What I fear is that this poetry is offering a kind of roadmap for young people trying to figure out their lives, but the roadmap is so cliché and well-worn as to be useless. I don’t see Pueblo’s personal perspective at all. When I was young, I turned to Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Mary Karr, Toni Morrison, Charles Simic, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Lois Lowry, J.D. Salinger, and some Stephen King. The benefit of turning to a chorus of voices who offer guidance in their specificity is that there is seldom the danger that you’ll take one perspective too seriously. Yes, I wanted to bad like Rimbaud, and I wanted to be angry and sad like Plath, and I wanted to be sexy like Karr, deep and rooted like Morrison, surreal like Simic, witty like Wilde, a feminist like Alcott, a visionary like Lowry, honest like Salinger, and scary like King, but because each was so unique it was impossible to model my writing or my intentions too precisely on any one of them.

Pueblo’s prescriptiveness is so pervasive in Clarity & Connection that it is almost pathological. It is too easy to see the roadmap—so easy as to be useless at best, or dangerous at worst. Is it really true that we “should not trust” the way we see ourselves when our “mood is down?” I’m not so sure. Can’t pain also be instructive?

Pueblo’s thesis is basically this: know thyself. Turn inward, face emotions, embrace your difficult parts because there is no relationship that can be had unless one first has a strong relationship with oneself. It’s not terrible advice, but it can get terribly repetitive.

Some of these pieces read like journal entries written after the writer read something enlightening. For example there’s one piece that summarizes the Buddha’s teachings on craving: “attachment is also when you try to place restrictions on the unexpected and natural movements of reality.” I don’t see a poetic reprocessing of the raw material into art, though. There’s this line from another poem, “a mind full of attachments craves the fulfillment of its yearnings and attempts to mold the world into the shape it desires.” There are moments inspired by Pema Chödrön, which are virtual paraphrases, and there are poems that dissipate into a cloud of New Age smoke: “the world is a giant pool of moving vibrations…when we cultivate out minds, / we cleanse our personal vibe.”

In many ways, these pieces read like half-formed essays. For example, Pueblo follows up his discussion of craving with this: “it is important to note that there is a substantial difference between craving and having goals or preferences.” What follows is a half-formed interrogation of attachment which paradoxically privileges attachment to happiness. Nuance isn’t Pueblo’s strong suit. These investigations of philosophical and Buddhist thought could have been better served with more time and artistry. There’s a whole section on attachment and relationships that show all the excitement of a writer delving into Buddhist thought. But unlike writers like Jane Hirshfield who subject their philosophy to poetic transformations, the material here remains quite raw.

The sad thing about Clarity & Connection is that it could have been a far better poetry book if it had just been edited down and made much shorter, and if the writer had taken more time with the work. Hidden within the fluff are some moments of illumination. I was struck by the simplicity of a poem that arrives early in the book and could have easily been the opening poem: “do what is right for you / do it over and over again.” Those two lines remind me of Seamus Heaney praising the poetry of Han Shan: “There is no path / that goes all the way—enviable stuff, / unfussy and believable.” Isn’t this the goal of all poets—to write “enviable stuff / unfussy and believable?” With those two lines Yung Pueblo hits a high note, one worthy of opening a book. Enviable stuff.

A patient reader is sometimes rewarded. Buried at the end of another poem is this: “if i build a home within myself, a palace of peace created with my own awareness and love, this can be the refuge i have always been seeking.” Simple. Yes. But also beautiful. If Pueblo were a skilled poet, he’d find another image to yoke to this, like Hafiz could do, and really have something to work with. Here’s another: “a clear mission / does not always have a clear path.” And here’s another: “when we travel inward, we may hit a particularly rocky layer of the mind, a sediment of conditioning that has been thickly reinforced.”

The moments of genuine wisdom in this collection arrive almost accidentally, and seemingly unknown to the writer himself. There are some exceptions; Pueblo seems aware that his insight, “we need to make compassion structural” is important if only because he chooses to put it in italics.

Ultimately, though, these moments were unfortunately few and far between. I often found myself distracted while reading this book, in the same way I find myself distracted when an often repeated commercial comes on the radio. I’ve heard so many of these themes before. “Inner work” and the urge to go “inward” are not new ideas, and they haven’t quite been refined into art in Yung Pueblo’s Clarity & Connection. If you’re looking for self-help, or for poetry, there are other books where you’ll find it better done.

Strong content writing is the distraction. But what happens when we are distracted from the distraction?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Writing about gratitude is rare. Books that openly express gratitude rarer still. Psychologists have done research on whether it is possible to help patients heal by helping them start a gratitude practice, for example, by having them write letters of gratitude to another person, but I’m somewhat skeptical about gratitude as a homework assignment. I never much took to gratitude lists, and can’t say I actually started a real and genuine gratitude practice until I moved to Hawai’i. My gratitude practice doesn’t involve lists, nor does it involve the more suspicion-inducing device of a gratitude journal or app. It often involves my sitting in silence, watching the sun rise over Diamond Head, and reminding myself how lucky I am do be here—present on this planet, present in Hawai’i, and present and able to find the courage to finally do the things I’ve always wanted to do (publishing a poetry book and this blog are among them). I’m much more fascinated about what can be learned from those around me who are genuinely grateful. Grateful authors are included, and that brings me to Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s prose is like sliding into a steaming hot bath of gratitude, or like sipping a hot tea of gratitude, or like being embraced by a warm embrace of loving gratitude. Time and time again in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s stunning collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Kimmerer interrogates modern culture and asks if there might be an alternative way to define personal responsibility, one that includes responsibility to community, to the land one lives upon, to the water one drinks, and to the food one eats. The threads of responsibility, in this framework, are not created by the iron chains of law, but rather, by the gentler bonds of gratitude.

Ever since I’ve moved to Hawai’i, I’ve felt something I never felt living anywhere else. It’s hard to define exactly, but never have I felt such an imperative to give back to those around me and to the land, and when I trace that desire back to its source, the source is always gratitude. I’ve lived in Miami, New York, Gainesville, Toronto, and places in between, and I have sometimes felt gratitude, but this is a new feeling. There is an urgency to my urge to give back, an urgency to my gratitude. It overwhelms me. It shapes the decisions I make.

Maybe this is the kind of feeling I imagine people have when they are home.

One cannot just move to Hawai’i without raising all kinds of ghosts. There is the ghost of colonialism, the ghosts of all the other fools who thought that moving half a Pacific away from everywhere else would change their lives or make them better people, and the ghosts of the indigenous people who sailed their canoes here, who brought their legends thousands of miles to this land.

Moving to Hawai’i won’t change your life. Too many haunted people come here and bring themselves along for the ride, and trust me, Hawai’i doesn’t need that baggage. But, if you are humble, Hawai’i, and the act of living on an island, has lessons to teach.

Modern capitalistic culture defines the limits of our responsibilities to one another in terms of monetary exchange, but indigenous cultures often define responsibility in terms of gifts and gratitude. When the GOP talks about personal responsibility, it means personal responsibility to pay your bills, buy your food, and pay your rent, and to pay your taxes. But when personal responsibility is considered in the light of gratitude, it becomes a responsibility we all have to each other, to our communities, to the soil, to the water, to the air, and to the forests. When you live on an island, there’s nowhere to go. Everyone has a responsibility to protect the little land we have.

Often I have sat stupid before the beauty of Hawai’i. To live here often feels like having been given a gift you’ll never be able to pay back. Soft rains drift down from the misty peaks of Tantalus, seeming to threaten a storm, but they come instead to soften the afternoon heat with a coolness perfumed by the sea. Waikiki seldom gets much rain. The overcast days come as a shock.

In the mornings, when I surf, the sea turtles rise from the bottom of the reef, and they bring with them the ordinary persistence of beings who have survived, who will survive. A blue plastic bag drifts by looking like a man-of-war and I feel a pang of responsibility again, to these beaches, to the sea, and to the creatures within. I grab the bag. I measure the distance from the sun to the horizon and therefore come to know the time. It’s time to work. Time to write. I paddle home. I throw out the trash.

But how will I meet my responsibilities if I do not know what they are?

Kimmerer distinguishes between being indigenous to a place and being naturalized. I’ll never be indigenous to Hawai’i, but perhaps I can someday become naturalized: “Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit… Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.”

To live on an island is to have a particular responsibility. No one, however strange, is really a stranger. Our resources are limited. If disaster were to strike, we are all thousands of miles away from land. We all felt this together during the early weeks of the pandemic, when stores closed, and grocery shelves went empty. Island living demands additional care for one’s environment, and for one’s neighbor. If we use shitty pesticides on our lawn, they go into the sea, where we all play, where our kids play.

Kimmerer argues for an interaction with the environment that involves exchange and a moral imperative to protect the lives that we extinguish to nourish our own: “How do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take?” This requires a revisioning of the natural world from a resource we can use, to a living entity that can be harmed with overuse. “The taking of another life to support your own is far more significant when you recognize the beings who are harvested as persons, nonhuman persons vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit—and who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it.”

So often we view conservation as a zero-sum-game. If humans take resources, nature loses. If humans don’t take resources, nature wins. Kimmerer imagines another way. What if humans could interact with nature responsibly, living sustainably, taking only what they need, restoring when they don’t? What if I could catch a fish or swim in the sea and not think I’m just taking and hurting nature?

Kimmerer writes that her students often only think about human interaction with the environment as destructive. But even our best intentions at restoration have their unintended consequences, as Kimmerer explains in her essay “A Mother’s Work,” where she finds that cleaning a pond results in the death, not only of algae, but of tadpoles and other creatures that reside within the nutrient-rich ecosystem: “It came to me once again that restoring a habitat, no matter how well intentioned, produces casualties.”

I have learned from those around me that human interaction with the environment doesn’t always need to be destructive. Native Hawaiians nurtured food trees in the forest, and to this day, you can walk through a forest of avocado trees up in the mountains above Honolulu. To this day, you can find nutrient-rich breadfruit trees growing in some forests. Native Hawaiians kept fishponds, and they farmed their fish. This modification of the seashore wasn’t destructive, and afforded added protection to the reef fish that weren’t overfished as a result.

Modern science often draws a stark distinction between science and ancestral knowledge. Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry believes otherwise. She believes that ancestral wisdom can sometimes be measured by science so that we can better understand the ways traditional practices can inform modern science, agriculture, and ecology. She writes eloquently about a graduate student who studied methods of harvesting sweetgrass. Skeptical deans at the university claimed that “anyone knows that harvesting a plant will damage the population.” But the graduate student wasn’t daunted, and her research revealed that harvesting, when performed with restraint, actually promoted the plant population. “We are all the product of our world-views—even scientists who claim pure objectivity.” Some plants have symbiotic relationships with humans. Reading Kimmerer, it almost seems possible to imagine a world in which humans interact positively with their environment. It gave me hope. It makes me think about the men and women restoring ancient Hawaiian fish ponds in Pearl Harbor, so that maybe in the next generation, we can fish there, and eat. It makes me think about the men and women planting taro in the mountains so that maybe, when the hundred year flood comes, it won’t drown us all.

Human beings must consume in order to survive. But how we consume is a choice. Kimmerer writes: “When does taking become outright theft? I think my elders would counsel that there is no one path, that each of us must find our own way.” Something gives up its life in the cycle of life and Kimmerer often views this cycle of giving as part of the earth’s immense gifts. But I keep thinking over and over about Kimmerer writing about factory farming and mechanized slaughterhouses. How can that be anything other than theft?

“The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us. One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence.”

I forage in the mountains and find avocados, breadfruit, lemons, and guava. I eat the things the earth here freely grows. I buy fish pulled from the sea. I am in awe it still works at all.

I have often asked myself what I owe the earth and the people around me. What do I owe Hawai’i? What can I give back?

Since moving to Hawai’i, I have often been filled with immense waves of gratitude to be able to inhabit this sacred land, which feeds me, shelters me, nourishes my soul, sustains me. I have often asked myself what I can give back. The answer keeps returning, quiet at first, barely a whisper, but then louder.

I can give my words. I can give my words.

I sometimes wonder if there’s futility in writing, in the work I do, but “The work of living is creating a map for yourself.” And so I keep writing because to “carry a gift is also to carry a responsibility” and because I believe that there is love, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and restoration in words, and because I believe that words will be the first stones we throw into the water—first to create a ripple, and then to create a makeshift bridge—to perhaps chart another way to live more lightly upon this planet.

Maybe I’ll never deserve Hawai’i. But I’ll try to write my way there, anyway. With gratitude.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

In Netflix’s fascinating documentary, Coded Bias, we learn about racist algorithms (you know, the algorithms that can’t identify Black people’s faces as faces, the algorithms that recommend that Black men get sent to jail for longer sentences than White men because of all the years of biased data (see ProPublica), and the algorithms that sell poor people advertisements for casinos and payday lenders), but poetry was the last thing I expected to encounter. When it comes to algorithms vs. poetry, we pretty much already know which one is going to win, and it’s not going to be poetry. When it comes to social algorithms, intensity of feeling feeds the signal. And the more intense and bad the feeling, the stronger the signal. If feeling feeds the signal, poetry’s signal is too subtle to be heard, while angry click-bait will get happily get picked up every time. Joy Buolamwini, the heroine of Coded Bias, is no ordinary artificial intelligence researcher, and Coded Bias is not an ordinary film about tech dystopia. One of the most important moments in the film was when Buolamwini stopped in the middle of an advocacy meeting (where she fights to protect people from invasion of technology into their private spaces) to read a poem she had written. It was a poignant moment because poetry is probably one of the lowest-tech forms of expression out there. And, here it was, still serving a purpose in the fight against bias. Buolamwini is an activist helping communities fight coded bias. She calls herself a “poet of code” on her website. 

These days, it’s all too easy to villainize the big tech giants, but much more difficult to put together a convincing argument about how we should respond to their many “disruptions.” I’ve written on this blog about Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now, but Lanier still has failed to get me to quit social media, despite the fact that I agree with him entirely. Algorithmic injustice, that is to say, problems that arise when algorithms reflect our culture’s biases, are more easily addressed from the top down, than from the bottom up (that is, one person out of a billion choosing to delete a single account). In fact, Coded Bias is the rare social and cultural documentary that offers a fairly straightforward and practical solution to the problem. Buolamwini argues that there should be an “FDA for code and algorithms.” Basically, the researchers argue that we need government oversight of the algorithms being used to make decisions about our lives.

Algorithms affect virtually every aspect of our lives. Algorithms influence our search results. They influence the advertisements we are shown on social media and on the web. They influence which friends’ profiles we see first in our feeds, and which profiles we see in our feeds period. They influence whether we get credit, or don’t get credit. They influence the price we pay for insurance. They influence the criminal justice system, in that they offer sentencing guidelines and probation guidelines in some jurisdictions. They can influence hiring decisions. Algorithms can influence which college applications or resumes don’t get read, and which ones get rejected outright. They can influence who gets a seat at the table. They influence search results which shape our economic decisions and our understanding of the world.

The artificial intelligence researchers and algorithm critics in Coded Bias argue that we need an “FDA for algorithms” to review any algorithm for potential bias before it is used in public. This is just basic common sense.

Algorithms are the opposite of poetry, but in some ways they are also similar. You put raw data into an algorithm. Something mysterious happens in the “black box” of code, and data comes out. The person creating the code doesn’t know why the results came out the way they did, just that they did. The same is a little true for poetry. The poet experiences the world. Something mysterious happens. A poem is written. When the poem is good, the poet often doesn’t know how it came out the way it did.

I first encountered coded bias when I read about it in a ProPublica article years ago. I was working for criminal defense lawyers, writing SEO copy for their websites, and I thought algorithmic bias was something important that they know about, and something important that their clients should know about, especially when clients were choosing whether to accept or not accept plea deals. I don’t know whether my writing made an impact on people’s lives. I only know my writing worked when it was fed into Google’s algorithm. It was good SEO. I hope it was also good for the world.

But that’s precisely the problem. What’s good for SEO isn’t always what’s good for the common good. What goes viral isn’t always moral nor is it always in the best interests of our culture. Anger and hate goes viral. Nuance, complexity, and poetry, not so much.

When it comes to racist algorithms vs. poetry, you already know which one is going to win. My question is, how do we change our engagement with the online world so that poetry and nuance win more? I think this is where critics come in. Which brings us back to gatekeepers, and our trust of gatekeepers.

But these days, the gatekeepers are more often more beholden to advertisers than the public’s best interest. And because of the free flow of information on the web, everyone can be a critic. Coded Bias touches the heart of a knowledge crisis in America and also the world. If algorithms are biased in favor of the wealthy and powerful, if people are biased because of these algorithmic feeds, and if capitalism demands that content sells, thus benefitting the capitalized and the powerful, who can we really trust. Who are our real critics? The next generation of critics might need to critique the web itself, particularly the more popular and influential spaces on the web. But who will trust them?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s third book of poetry, Water I Won’t Touch, is a collection of poems about the trans experience. Candrilli captures their transformation in free verse that feels like it’s been pulled from a diary. While reading Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch (Candrilli’s third book of poetry) I found myself often reminded of Rupi Kaur’s Home Body (Kaur’s third book of poetry). While Candrilli’s poetry explores the trans experience and Kaur’s poetry explores cis female experience, both poets share a simplicity of expression, a bare, almost barren, directness of language in the search for embodied self-acceptance, and a reliance on the relatively unadorned conveyance of their personal stories in free verse. While it isn’t the best book poetry I’ve read all year, Candrilli’s poetry offers a space for solace, and can provide trans youth growing and going through similar experiences a place for commiseration. This makes the book important. In the same way that I cautiously applaud Kaur’s somewhat clumsy poetry for its ability to sometimes transcend its own limitations, I applaud Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch, for offering a similar testament to the transcendence of trauma and the power of coming into one’s own while inhabiting one’s own body fully. Both writers explore what it means to reside in a body in a world hostile to that body. Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch offers a space where trans youth can find deep solace.

While Candrilli’s poetry is more sophisticated than Kaur’s, this is the result of education and good editing. Kaur’s poetry is rougher around the edges, less self-consciously formed, but for all of Candrilli’s careful MFA-styled shaping, the poems “feel” much like Kaur’s, unfiltered experience recollected in tranquility. Here are two lines: “In the beginning, there was a boy, / who touched me as he shouldn’t have.” Who wrote this? Kaur or Candrilli?

Those are the first two lines of the first poem in Water I Won’t Touch. The poem goes on: “I think I knew I was a boy / when the boy touched me.”

Sometimes, less is more. Candrilli writes: “Sometimes it is so easy to have so little… My mother had our property logged of all its timber / so I could move away and learn to write poetry.” This is stunning metaphorical work, and it shows Candrilli’s poetic sophistication. The transformation of the trees into pulp so that the young writer might be able to go and write the poetry to fill the blank pages so often produced by logging is a spectacular metaphorical leap. Candrilli is a skilled poet; they know their craft, its limitations, and they know how to shape the raw material of observation into artful poetry. Kaur doesn’t (yet) have this skill. Yet, I find it instructive to compare the two writers, whom I believe are ultimately addressing similar subject matter (from drastically different perspectives) and addressing an audience that is more similar than it is different. Both writers convey the experience of living in a body maligned by society (Kaur writes about the ways the “pussy” is defamed by men, while Candrilli writes about their breasts as trash, while loving what remains), and both writers struggle to find self-acceptance beyond self-loathing.

Hidden in Candrilli’s book are some stunners, but like Kaur’s Home Body, I had to carefully seperate it from the chaff. In “On Traveling Together” the speaker sees two boys cuddling on the couch in a motel room, and they jump when the speaker passes: “It’s clear by the ways the boys/ jump as I walk by: / their parents know nothing. / The floor is lava. / The continental / breakfast will start soon. / The couch they’re on is an island / I’ve been to.” No man is an island, as John Donne once famously wrote. The difficulty of being different, of hiding one’s true self when one is young, and the painful isolation it creates, is Candrilli’s subject—the illusion of the island.

There are poems shocking and heartbreaking, like “On Having Forgotten to Recycle” where the speaker writes about their breasts sent “to soak in an offshore landfill” perhaps “floating alongside jellyfish or plastic straws.” Several times in the book the breasts are rendered as waste, as refuse, and while the metaphor shocks, it invites the reader inside the experience of a body resisting the body’s parts in a way that is difficult to read and also enlightening. There’s a heartbreaking self-loathing in many of these poems. I’d hardly compare removed breasts (“biological waste”) to the more permanent and less biodegradable plastic waste spiraling in the Pacific, killing animals as we speak, but I feel like I can grasp something of what the speaker is trying to convey: a sense of disgust, self-destruction from within, unproductive waste, and loss. Later the speaker imagines their partner’s “ovarian cysts” fertilizing “a garden.” This creates an interesting distinction between the cysts and the breasts; fertilizer waste is productive, while the speaker’s breast waste, like unrecycled plastic, will never be productive. Candrilli writes: “It’s true that we can hold / just about everything inside us, whether we want to or not.” There sum of these small descriptions are devastating to read, but offer an important narrative of the self, undergoing transformation.

Candrilli writes: “I do not regret my body / but I regret the hands of most / who have touched it.”

Some of these poems take the breath away quite literally: “Just before my double mastectomy / my partner asked whether the surgeon would open / me deep enough to see / my heart.” Candrilli writes: “I imagine a knife blade / is what has come closest to my core– / a violent scraping of breast / tissue from muscle / that still aches / months and months later.” There is a violent and ever-present materialism to these poems—the sense that the self is the body and the body is the self. There is no spirit, no ghost in the machine. There’s something terrifying about this, but also something wonderful in the poet’s refusal to perform metaphysical gymnastics. Later, in the best and most artful poem in the book, “Transgender Heroic: All This Ridiculous Flesh” the speaker contemplates their hands and writes: What happens now / will matter later and I would like / to be proud of myself.” This is one of the most stunning transformations in the book. Up to this point, the body has undergone so much transformation: breast into trash, breast into biological waste, body into more acceptable form, but here, the hands become matter, too. All that is body eventually becomes not-alive. The hands become the possibility of matter, the possibility of waste. In a purely materialist poetry, all that matters is now. The body is matter, either breast matter that fills a landfill, and hands are also material that will die. But for now, the hands are theirs and they matter. Candrilli’s transformations are sublime and rooted on earth.

Still, there are some unfortunate experiments in this book. Anyone can write a sestina if you let the line go on long enough, and Candrilli lets the line go on long enough in “Sestina Written as Though Genesis.” There are gems here, but they are buried within a poem that feels like it’s trying to do too much at once, without having quite earned that muchness.

Yet, the poetic transgressions can be forgiven. Candrilli writes: “I believe that / had I known one trans person / as a child, I’d have half as many scars / as an adult. I could have come / around to this body so much sooner.”

The power of literature is that it allows us, for a brief moment, to step inside lives so different from our own. The power of literature is that sometimes, we find ourselves lying on the floor, gut-punched with awful relief to learn we are not alone. My hope for Candrilli’s poetry is that there will be trans teens and youth out there who will find it, and find in this poetry a kindred spirit—and perhaps start writing poetry of their own.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Poems for meditation, like meditation itself, invite the reader into the ambiguity and flux of the present moment. Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield is a book of poems for meditation that captures the complexity of consciousness, the brevity of the present moment, and the changeable nature of “now.”

I know I’ve found a good poetry book when it takes me months to read it. (Most poetry books are pretty bad. I devour them in about an hour once I figure out the author’s conceit. The truth is, most poets don’t really have much to say.) I know I’ve found a good poetry book when I don’t quite have the words to write about it, when I don’t quite know what to say. Good poetry evades all paraphrase. Jane Hirshfield’s Come, Thief evades paraphrase and isn’t devoured quickly. Over the past many months, I’ve read the book up in the mountains of Manoa, where rain splattered the pages, threatening to make the pages translucent, by the sea, where sand covered the words, while sitting on my couch where sunlight dazzled the words out of existence, burning them into my mind. Hirshfield’s Come Thief is a book to be read slowly, each poem pondered like its own prayer bead. I sat with these poems, meditated upon them.

Come, Thief’s conceit isn’t particularly complex, but it is expansive. Hirshfield examines the brevity of joy, the brevity of the present moment. The thief is time. Hirshfield’s task is to observe and let change happen without attachment. Hirschfield’s subject is now, and it is consciousness itself.

Hirshfield has come to be known as a “Buddhist” poet. According to Poetry Foundation, she spent eight years studying at the San Francisco Zen Center. The patience of a person who is accustomed to sitting in silence is evident in each one of these poems. There’s an expansive consciousness in even the smallest of these poems.

The opening poem, “French Horn” reminds us that the joys in life are brief. If Buddhist philosophy teaches us that attachment is the beginning of suffering, Hirshfield’s poems attempt to capture the moment before attachment takes hold.

Hirshfield also addresses the complexities of consciousness itself, particularly the complexity of consciousness aware of itself and other beings. For instance, in the poem “First Light Edging Cirrus” she writes: “So it was when love slipped inside us. / It looked out face to face in every direction. / Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.” Perception informs everything perceived. The abundance of early love radiates onto all things seen. But there’s also a mysterious radiance that goes beyond mere perception. Hirshfield doesn’t simplify the radiance into merely the act of the observer observing. She alludes to an energy that exists between beings. The poem begins by describing the atomic weight of objects, a pure materialism found in most modern poetry. Ten to the twenty fifth “molecules / are enough / to call wood thrush or apple. A hummingbird, fewer.” Yet, Hirshfield doesn’t leave her poem in the world of atomic numbers, in the world of pure materialism. If most of what makes an atom is the pure space for energy to move through freely, Hirshfield is less interested in the atoms’ material self, than in the free space through which the energy moves. Again and again we are returned to the flux and motion of the now, the unpredictability of the present, the ambiguity of here.

Hirshfield is a master at writing about change as well. Here she describes change in “The Decision:” “…something slips through it—/ looks around, / sets out in the new direction, for other lands. / Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.” To look at change with non-attachment would be to call change “simply changed.” To write a poem is itself the act of attaching to a thing, to a story. Hirshfield manages to capture that struggle in her language, and through the language, free herself.

The bounty of these poems is the simplicity of the observation, expanded slowly into the mysterious and lucid. In her poem “A Day is Vast” Hirshfield writes: “A day is vast. / Until noon. / Then it’s over.” Something is always just slipping away from us. Something is always just arriving. And just when we’ve had enough time to notice it, it’s already half gone. Hirshfield has managed to capture in Come, Thief the closest approximation to representing meditation in poetry. Hirshfield feels deeply into consciousness, her subject, as in “Building and Earthquake,” where she writes, “Who thought that the fear was the meaning / when being able to feel the fear was the meaning.”

Hirshfield’s book of poetry has been written about as a testament to her Buddhist faith. See the review of the book in Orion. If this is a book of faith, it is a testament to faith in the present moment, a testament to the power and expansiveness of right now.

Perhaps the greatest praise is inspiration.

I know a poetry book is good when it inspires me to write. I wrote Corvid one morning while reading Come, Thief. I’ll leave with that.

Corvid

It was a lost year, anyway

So we put the bird feeder inside the house.

Let the floor go to seed.

We kept the window open

And the trades blew through.

A bird flew inside. Then another.

One got lost

Under the ceiling fan, spinning,

Until exhausted it landed

At the feet of the Buddha

I’d put on a platform over the kitchen table

Where we had laid out

The mangoes and the breadfruit.

And there they sat: bird and Buddha.

Until the bird came to its senses,

Saw the opened window,

And flew outside. 

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Melissa Febos’s Girlhood book has been covered by the New York Times and Atlantic for its incisive and original cultural criticism. Febos takes a deeper and original look at slut-shaming, the subtle and not-so-subtle violations young girls begin to experience once they enter puberty, and the self-alienation of early sexual experience. What has flown under the radar in virtually all reviews is Febos’s apt insight into the way policing in America repeatedly fails women. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and now, more recently, after the murder of Daunte Wright, we have rightfully arrived again at a national reckoning about the many ways policing fails Black communities and people of color. But policing also fails women. We cannot talk about police reform without talking about race and police brutality. But we also cannot talk about police reform without talking about the police’s willful failure to protect women. We cannot talk about police reform without talking about how police are quick to use excessive police force against people of color while failing to adequately direct resources of the police force to protect women from sexual violence and violence in general.

In “Intrusions” an essay about peeping Toms and stalkers, Febos’s book, Girlhood interrogates the various ways the police fail to protect women, particularly in the realm of domestic violence and the violation of women’s private space. The peeping Tom is often used as a cultural joke or plot line in film and television, but the psychological and financial cost of the crime is high. “Every woman in New York, and perhaps any city, knows her bodily relief after the apartment door is shut and locked behind her.” Febos writes of a man who catcalled her from her window. She explains: “The violation of that sanctity filled me with panic.”

Febos doesn’t immediately call the police. She writes: “My instinct was to blame myself, and I assumed that they would too. They would say I was overacting…” I know many women who share this skepticism. I too have been sexually assaulted. When I told my brother what happened to me, he asked me why I didn’t call the police. A woman knows why. Even when women report incidents to the police, police often fail to do anything about them.

Febos writes about a woman who was stalked by a man who put sexually explicit and sexually violent notes notes on her door. I won’t repeat the horrifying contents of the notes here, only that the notes let the woman know she was being watched and that she was a target for sexual assault. When the woman called the police, the officer asked her “What do you want us to do?” He explained that he could drive by the house, but couldn’t monitor the house. The police told the woman that she could expect the notes and stalking to get worse. When the woman asked the officer what he would do, he advised her to move. She moved.

The police know what to do when they see someone speeding. They know what to do when they get a report that a convenience store clerk has received a fake $20. They know what to do when they suspect Black and Latino kids might have weed in their backpacks. Why don’t they know what to do when a woman reports that she’s been stalked? Why don’t they know what to do when a woman reports that she’s being menaced, threatened, followed?

We live in a society where there are enough police to wander up and down the streets every morning in New York and other cities giving tickets to people who park in the wrong place. Why won’t police marshal these resources to patrol streets where women have reported sexual harassment, where women have reported being stalked? There are places in our communities where assault is more likely to happen: certain parking garages at night, subways, parks.

Febos eventually reported her stalker to the police. Predictably, there was nothing they could do. The officer asked her if she knew the man. She didn’t know him. Because she didn’t know him, she couldn’t file a restraining order. When Febos asked if the police officer could send someone to watch over her home, the cop almost laughed.

Women who are stalked are often left with no other option but to move, and often the police will even advise that women move in such situations. Not all women have the option to move. Moving is expensive. Breaking a lease can have financial consequences. It can cost several thousand dollars just to put together a deposit payment on a new apartment and hire movers, not to mention the time cost of trying to find a new place to live. If a woman lives in public housing, moving may not be an option. If a woman owns her own home, moving may not be an option.

In the early days of the pandemic thieves broke into my condo garage and stole things from my car. Then they kept breaking in. Over and over. Video in the garage even captured a thief in my car, doing nothing at all, just sitting in the driver’s seat staring over my steering wheel. It was alarming. I’d leave my condo in the dark early mornings to surf with the sunrise (one of the few remaining joys I had in lockdown life), but I encountered strangers lurking in the garage. It was terrifying. I called the police repeatedly. There was nothing they could do. They advised me to move. I explained, as calmly as I could muster, that it was unlikely I’d be able to sell my condo during the height of a global pandemic.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 10 million adults experience domestic violence annually in the United States. Domestic violence takes on many forms. It takes the form of sexual assault, rape, murder, stalking, threats, and economic or emotional or psychological abuse. The cost to society is high. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that intimate partner violence cost the U.S. economy anywhere between $5.8 billion and $12.6 billion annually. I wonder whether moving costs are factored in.

Stalking doesn’t just harm women financially, or psychologically, it is often the first sign of real and present danger. Febos writes: “Homicide Studies reports that 89 percent of murdered women were also stalked within twelve months of their killing, and 54 percent of murdered women reported stalking to the police beforehand.” Where were the police?

When I first moved to Waikiki, I woke one morning to hear shouting coming from a parking lot downstairs. A man yelled aggressively at a woman. Then he hit her. I called the police. The dispatcher told me someone was on their way. The man chased the woman through the parking lot. People in their balconies watched on in horror. We shouted at him, telling him to leave her alone, letting him know he had been seen. I was shocked at how long the police took to arrive. By the time they arrived, the man had run away. I don’t know if they caught him.

This is not an isolated incident. Febos writes about reporting a rape to the police and being “amazed by how long they took to arrive.”

According to the BBC, an employee at Cup Foods called the police on George Floyd at 20:01. Six minutes later at 20:08, police arrived. Derek Chauvin was one of those officers. Six minutes to arrive. When it takes longer for police to arrive at the scene of a sexual assault or domestic violence than it takes them to make it to the scene for an alleged counterfeit twenty, we have a problem.

And then, Derek Chauvin pressed his knee to George Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes.

I’ve had trouble watching the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. After hearing the witness testimony, it’s just too painful. In the opening days of the trial, I watched the witnesses take the stand, and repeatedly tell the courtroom about how helpless they felt in the face of what was unfolding before them: a police officer killing a man, holding his knee to George Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes. Frank Bruni of the New York Times has written brilliantly about the trauma the bystanders suffered. Bystanders even tried calling the police on the police.

Hearing the testimony reminded me of a time I had also felt helpless standing right in front of police. Years ago, my friend and I were holding up a protest sign at Occupy Wallstreet. Half a dozen police officers stood in front of us, a mere six feet away. We were peaceful. Then, a white man dressed in black holding a tiny American flag came up to me from behind and pressed himself into my body. He did the same thing to my friend. He grabbed at us. The police were only feet away, right in front of us. We cried out for help. They saw it. They looked us in the eye. They did nothing. Men nearby tried to pull the man off us, but the man resisted. When the man looked like he was going to turn violent, I somehow made my way up to the police. I asked them for help. They stared at me impassively. They still did nothing. I had to literally turn around and run for my life, my safety.

Who were the police protecting that day? Who was Derek Chauvin protecting when he pressed his knee to the neck of George Floyd for nine and a half minutes? Who are the police protecting when they fail to take women seriously when they report stalking? When they report intimate partner violence? When women ask for someone to watch over their house, and the police refuse, where are the resources being used? Over and over policing in America protects the police and white men. It priviledges the protection of white men over Black people, brown people, and women.

Melissa Febos’s Girlhood book is a statement of the many violations women suffer. It is also an important commentary on the way those who have been charged to protect us fail to do so every day. It goes beyond victim blaming (she was dressed provocatively, what did you say to him, do you know him). It goes beyond minimizing women’s fear. The conversation about policing in America has just begun. We need to talk about the ways police fail women, and misuse their resources in Black and brown communities while ignoring women’s cries for help.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Let me start here. Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen, the 2020 Academy of American Poets First Book Award winner, ripped my first-book cynicism right out of my throat and left me open-mouthed, agog with awe. I’m a little skeptical of poets’ first books. Given the state of contemporary academic poetry, first books are improbable objects, plucked from obscurity often by an ever-changing army of poetry judges selected to judge the several dozen poetry contests run each year. These judges are more often than not offered only a selection of manuscripts by contest screeners. Poetry contests receive hundreds of manuscripts year after year. Only a fraction of these gets read by the judges themselves.

There’s just too much that can go wrong in the process. Take the Walt Whitman Award, for which Threa Almontaser was the 2020 selection and winner. First there’s the poet’s ability to afford entry into the contest itself, which costs $35 (though new guidelines at the Academy of American Poets make it possible for poets for whom the contest fee is a barrier to entry to write to the organization, I assume, to waive the entry fee—a much welcome development). Then, there’s the improbability of leaving the slush pile and making it to the judge’s table to begin with. Paid interns read these manuscripts (in my youth, the interns included some of my cohort studying poetry at Columbia’s School of the Arts). These pre-screeners often incorporate their own biases of what the judge will and won’t like when deciding whether to pass manuscripts to the judge. Yes, I’ve heard of judges who read the manuscripts they have been given and then ask to see more, but this is the exception, not the rule. The few manuscripts selected to be read must then somehow impress the judge, appeal to his or her aesthetic, and contain some spark the judge deems worthy of publication. The winners of these contests arrive in our hands as survivors of a process not unlike The Hunger Games. That so many first books arrive at publication sounding much like every other poetry book published in the last five years is not shocking in the least. Most first books of poetry are boring.

Selection by committee, as so many first poetry book contests are, seldom produces work that inspires, work that transcends. And yet, Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen inspires and transcends. Its opening poem, “Hunting Girliness” is a transcendent and transgressive feminist yawp that left me utterly speechless. Let this be my letter of gratitude to Harryette Mullen, who shows a hawk-like editorial eye in plucking this book out of obscurity. The Wild Fox of Yemen is not a perfect book, but it brings forth a singular voice.

I’ll start with the first poem, which embodies everything marvelous about this collection. Like a series of dominoes, Almontaser topples every stereotype of Muslim femininity and cliché about femininity in general. She writes about beating up boys at the park, making “one my wife / in a white dress when we play marriage.” And this: “Tell me, / when I can stop barbing my headscarves” and “I learn to love / my body by playing dead.” The speaker’s mother tells her to “Stop being reckless” and her response is: “Truth is,/ I quit being cautious in third grade / when the towers fell &, later, wore / the city’s hatred as hijab.” And the poem continues, a feminist roar: “Loop training bras to ceiling fans. / Stay hairy. She pulls out her prayer mat, / enlists God to drag a sharp nail across / my jaw as I sleep, shaving my girl beard off.” Holy fucking shit, girl.

In another poem, Almontaser describes her youthful henna tattoos. She will “flaunt the henna hand” to the “ancestors” while she explains she wants the “kids / at school to see me tatted. I draw gang signs on arms / at lunch.”

We are perhaps entering a Muslim cultural renaissance in America, where the children of 9/11 are old enough to comment on the atrocity of growing up in a world fashioned by a national security administration based on racial and religious profiling. Almontaser’s book of poetry reminds me of other thrilling works of art by young Muslim millennials. For example, in the stunning television series “Ramy” we are given a glimpse into the life of Muslim youth in New Jersey in the wake of 9/11. Ramy, the title character, and his male friends, negotiate and code-switch between urban New Jersey’s masculinity, and Muslim identity which eschews the holy trinity of millennial masculinity: sex, alcohol, and atheism. When Ramy travels to Egypt, he imagines he’ll be able to encounter a more authentic Muslim youth. Instead, he attends parties where the kids are more American than the Muslims in America, less devout, and more interested in learning about Jersey than in showing Ramy around the Nile. In America, Ramy struggles with what it means to Muslim. His Egyptian counterparts wonder what it’s like to be American. Ramy’s sister, the female perspective in all this, predictably gets buried in the show, her perspective glimpsed only from time to time—but always depicted in terms of the double-standards she must endure. Ramy can leave the house at all hours, but her parents need to know where she is at every moment. Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen gives us a depiction of female Muslim identity, a thrilling and profound testament, and an important cultural artifact of American life.

I will have to sit and ponder Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen for some time, marveling at the many faceted jewels in this collection. This is not a book that can be read in a single sitting. It’s too complex, too multi-faceted, too stunning. I know there is much I missed in my first read-through.

The act of writing oneself involves hardening oneself into a kind of definition, to surrender a bit of one’s own anonymity and ambiguity. To be Muslim in America is also to be marked, to lose a bit of one’s anonymity and ambiguity by the forces of national security and by cultural bias. Almontaser understands that her poetry will define her, but she subverts easy definition. Almontaser is hyper-aware of the ways a body can be read (the hijab is a legible metaphor worn on the body). She is hyper-aware of the ways her poetry will redefine her and also fix her in its new parameters. She plays with these expectations and subverts them.

She writes about her hair, “Ode to my Gordian knots.” But her hair is not for viewing. One of the best poems in the book is “When White Boys Ask to See My Hair.” In another poem, Almontaser explains: “I believed in Shaytan before I believed in the Power Rangers.” But she also knows where the real devil lives in modern America: “It would be three stalls back     in a woman’s highway restroom / where anything unspeakable can go down without a peep.” Later she saw “Shaytan at a red light in Apex, North Carolina:” a man pointing a gun at her through the car window in the Bible Belt.

Goodness, these poems are so good. Why did it take me 36 years to finally read a few good poems about female masturbation?

And yes, like any first book of poetry, there are poems that I’d probably edit, shorten, poems that splutter out in the end, unable to live up to the pure fury of their openings. “Muslim with Dog” could have ended just fine on the first page. The overtly political poems are among the weakest in the book. The careful tenebrism and polysemous explosions of meaning that Almontaser is capable of producing narrow to a fixed point in the more political pieces that ring a single, louder note. I don’t think the book is weaker for these political pieces, though. Almontaser earns them.

There are burst of light within some of them, like “The Ghaltan who pressed the launch button wishes / he were a blade of grass a beast eats / so that he is not accountable for anything.”

Almontaser is the winner of the Walt Whitman Award and like Walt Whitman, these poems are long-winded. Sometimes the length serves them. Sometimes not. I found myself often distracted mid-poem, much the way I found myself distracted while reading Whitman. Perhaps that’s the thrill: in their expansiveness, the poems draw the reader within and without their parameters.

This is a luminous and excellent first book of poetry, one of the best I’ve read this year.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.