With Both Hands: a Microreview
To offer or receive a gift with both hands is an act of humility. One hand is cruel, greedy, and demanding; but with two, we cradle the delicacy of what we want to give up or accept. Such is the poetics of gesture Toronto-based poet, artist, and community organizer Elizabeth Mudenyo explores in her first poetry chapbook, With Both Hands (Anstruther Press, 2020).
In these nine poems, Mudenyo explores the intricate yet expansive spaces of wanting and receiving, of touch or almost touching. “I arc towards her,” the speaker in “About Her” states, “bracketing a silence,” suggesting that the momentum of desire can sometimes involve giving up a part of it and harbouring it in secrecy.
This secrecy can be recognized in “the conversations between women / how they extend / towards each other / how they hold / each other’s gaze / each other’s breaths / giving and taking and giving back.” Here, the secret touch of intimacy is ethereal, serving as a reminder that desire’s psychic connections can be just as robust as physical ones.
To raise two hands is also an act of surrender, but “We will not lower our hands,” the speaker of “Hands Up” declares. “We will not be given time enough. / Between instruction and riots.” Forebodingly, “Only the soil spreads its arms” as if to embrace, but “If it hurts,” the speaker in “Clear Throat (Let Us)” acknowledges, “it is more earth to patch with story.” The seeds of grief are sown and tended to, and story becomes that which can hold things together, nourish what is fractured.
From the minute reflections of hands, Mudenyo moves to the cosmic, calling the universe “a kind weaver.” Mudenyo understands that sometimes this kindness needs to be moved: “pushing the expanse with both hands,” so that “the black ecstatic / takes me in / opens up / recognizing its kin.”
Mudenyo’s poems ask that we reflect on the power and politics of gesture that are sometimes barely noticeable but nonetheless resounding, poignant, and urgent.
Price: $10.00 CAD
ISBN: 9781988699646
Genre: Poetry
Pub date: September 22, 2021
Book Review
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August 13,
2021
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4-minute read
Prathna Lor
Prathna Lor, the poetry editor of Shrapnel, is a poet, essayist, and educator currently living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Their writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, and Canadian Literature, among other places.