godhouse

“i begin with ocean / floating in the free space of my ribs / somewhere between / ursa major and ursa minor.” So opens Ruth Ellen Kocher’s gripping eighth collection, godhouse, which examines the forces that shape the life of a Black woman raised by a white family: “i begin as a side bet / a detour into cosmos / via the elliptical path of my thumbprint.” In the pointedly named “cephalogenesis,” the speaker’s grandmother calls her mother “whore”; in contrast, the speaker recalls, “my mother tells me i am a god / i believe her.”

“in the beginning / my black body is gold / a storied summer,” begins “god of never again”; by the poem’s end, there is a marked shift in pronouns, as the “I” who “ask[s] sleep to remember what i am” becomes a “she” who “remembers only / i am all flame.” In “god of joy,” the speaker recounts being beaten in an alley and addressed with the n-word, all at the age of six:

what’s broken in me is vowel
shaped like a mouth
round enough to swallow
the world

The collection echoes racialized and gendered threats that continue into Black womanhood, such as when a man “says he could skin you / easily,” or when the speaker realizes “it takes me too long to learn that pretty is a white / myth that ends in death.”

Kocher traces the harmful responses to such violence, as when the speaker’s father teaches her not to whistle because she’s a girl, then “gives me my first knife” and “shows me the proper kind of fist”:

there are probably birds on the long
walk home but
i don’t remember them
because the pastoral
is not meant for
a young god
with a fist in each pocket
waiting for a reason

Through these poems, the speaker reclaims her mother’s anointment of her as god; as “in regard to being a woman” reveals, the personal arsenal includes the tool that molds these unsparing poems:

an object doesn’t have to be
sharp to save us
anything can become a grenade
though explosion is a thing of leaving
while sharpness is a thing of longing
i can hold a pen like a weapon