Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die

August 15, 2022
Organized around the four seasons, the poems in Mulalu's sensory and exciting debut combine surprising, even wry insights ("Afro's gone Medusa again.// Every coil's its own Hydra./ I'm adventuring with a comb") with powerful confessions ("Every day I find myself/ smaller with effort"). In "Argo, My Argo," which opens the collection's "Summer" section, the inanimate envies the animate, "Being alive must be nice,/ says the sink basin, filling// further with myths," complicating and layering Mulalu's investigation of diasporic Black African identity in America. Mulalu invokes other poets, especially Sylvia Plath (in "Aria" and "Frenzy"), for whom "it will only make me feel/ more real to know the pain of your mind." Other poems allude to Brahms and van Gogh, whose ear is described as "lying now without Zyrtec in a field/ abstracted here into this concerto for a single voice," but the allusions never overpower Mulalu's own vision and originality. These inventive, lyrical, and well-crafted poems offer memorable insights at every turn.

September 1, 2022

Following the chapbook Nearness, Gaborone, Botswana-born, New York City-based Mulalu debuts a full-length collection that features a speaker whose inquisitive mind leaps with connections. Tonally and formally, the poems likewise leap, from witty sincerity to frustration to mournfulness, from elegy to renga to delightful haiku. Told in four sections, each aligned with a season, a central preoccupation of the collection seems to be how (and if) people might see themselves and others clearly, amid the accumulated narratives and myths of race, nationality, love, and self ("I want to want myself as much as I want your shadows/ flickering against the walls of this cave, fooling me/ of presences beyond myself"). Mulalu's standout poems use syntax and a type of linked logic to play successfully and surprisingly with time and narrative. While readers may occasionally lose the thread of connection, the collection's energy is constant, and some of the poems' most straightforward moments are the most affecting ("Roots, / we learn to speak of them. The baobabs do/ not speak of themselves"), as in the fittingly titled "Clarity," the collection's moving and powerful final poem. VERDICT A sharp, playful, and thoughtful work for poetry lovers.--Amy Dickinson

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