Upile Chisala’s longer poems within soft magic. are her best. They float with the support of hard details, of dialogue, of character in the background, of sensory detail. Her poem listing the foods she uses to try and find home in the supermarket is one of these; another is the poem that begins “sometimes I eat poems / late at night,” or “He has found galaxies.” Or the ones that hold within them one-liners from a grandmother or mother, dialogue that tears and hurts, that hits home. Chisala finds her voice with these longer or dialogue-driven poems that seem to have detail-driven depth behind them. They stun and smoke with emotion, filling the reader with poetry like a cloud.
“sometimes i eat poems late at night when there’s a war in my belly and I’ve been tossing and turning for hours, trying to sleep you out of my skin. darling, I am snacking on soft words again, you left me none, you left me nothing to fuel the honey in my bones to wake the fire in my veins you left me nothing you left me none, so I slip out from between the sheets and feast on all the poems you should’ve written for me. all the poems I should’ve written for myself.”
Where Chisala struggles is the smaller poems. Many are a bit bland—one-liners of advice to a second-person audience that are a bit over-used in the volume of poetry, while the longer, more-involved poems are more spread out. I never really like exclamation points in poetry, and her use didn’t convince me; most of the poems with them included came off to me as a bit forced. But overall, the longer poems made this volume more than worth it, for the gems that are hidden within.
