The poems are at once familiar in sepia and soft focus\u2014narratives of an awkward playground wedding in the poem \u201cSixth Grade\u201d and a father embracing his daughter in the poem \u201cFlash\u201d\u2014but they also expand our collective definition of familiar. The childhood wedding\u2019s awkwardness comes not from age but from unexpressed queerness, and then with the father\u2019s pose revealing more menace than playfulness.<\/p>\n
The collection is a buildingswoman, crafted by a poet with rich perspective and knowledge in theology, philosophy, psychology, science, and oppression. Here is a speaker steeped in experience, measuring out \u201cThe Lies that Save Us\u201d. A lesbian couple in Georgia, \u201cwe lie like Abraham. \/ Are you sisters?<\/em> people ask. \/ Yes<\/em>, we answer. Twins, even<\/em>\u201d because there is always a small threat; it is always \u201ctick season and all\u201d for those who love outside the strict definition of heteronormative love, but this couple is safe in \u201cthe power of things unseen:\/ atoms, quarks, and auras, \/ and all the love that lies between. \/ Kissing energy, we call it.\u201d For those readers without Bible verses and Christian ritual etched into their psyches, the references are no more intimidating or threatening than two taps in a Google search, and for those with such etchings, these poems illuminate those familiar verses and rituals with a new wavelength.<\/p>\n Mosaic of the Dark<\/em>\u2019s perspective is multi-dimensional\u2014challenging prescriptive sexuality, naming the influence of class, unafraid to call out racism, interrogating incarceration, understanding education\u2019s inequities, and unabashed in examining mental health crises. The violations these poems catalogue range from micro\u2014beauty standards, assumptions of marital status, children\u2019s pettiness\u2014to the macro\u2014gang rape, murder, suicide\u2014and the full range in between abusive parents, abusive religions, abusive cultures.<\/p>\n However, as the astounding poem \u201cAmanant\u201d, and indeed the entire collection demonstrates, powerful, visceral, and affective art does not require (porno)graphic or gratuitous violence or flagrant confession. Even without delving into the event that inspired the poem, the horror of the lines \u201cthe human intestine\/ is approximately five feet long.\/\/ Only five percent of hers\/ would remain\u201d is magnified by the preceding \u201cIf dark matter could draw,\/ it would not draw itself.\u201d Dordal then reveals the catastrophically obvious lies we perpetuate by ending with \u201cAnd the woman, it was said, died peacefully.\u201d Without using exposure or letting any blood, Dordal raises bile. She uses a very precise but journalistic epigraph as a compass to point the reader to the context, should they desire to read the details of the gang rape. The same graphic-free but gravitational tide of emotion comes in smaller waves too. It is there in the father\u2019s dismissal of her suicide attempt at the end of the \u201cThe Living Room\u201d\u2014 \u201cAspirin? He\u2019d say.\/ Aspirin can\u2019t kill you<\/em>\u201d. It can also be seen in the mother\u2019s critique of a minor aspect of the speaker\u2019s wedding\u2014her first, to a man, the ultimate attempt at performing straightness, which her most-likely queer mother never gave up enacting \u2014\u201dwas a summons from the past\/ to get things right.\u201d<\/p>\n Thankfully, Dordal\u2019s injection of lyricism gives the book a respite from the voyeuristic confessional that has become expected of those who have survived and depict trauma. Midwesterners will recognize a super\/uncanny power to speak of the thing without naming it; in Dordal\u2019s poems this characteristic disengagement is harnessed instead to illustrate never-before articulated feelings. There is a redemption in such harnessing\u2014turning the surrounding silence which confounded, frustrated, and repressed in childhood into a tender, empathetic, world-enhancing skill in adulthood.<\/p>\n Mosaic of the Dark<\/em> is a survival guide and toolkit. Instead of a Swiss army knife there is respect for the ways people survive despite their dysfunction(s). Dordal humanizes rather than admonishes those who hurt her. Instead of matches and water filters there is a spirituality of interconnectedness. There is a blanket against the slow hypothermia of silence. There is anti-poison to combat the ever-triggered flight or fight of depression and anxiety. Because what happens at the end of Holy Week\u2014the title of the second section and a guide to the book\u2019s arc, the speaker\u2019s survival\u2014is resurrection,redemption, redefinition. This comes to pass even when a prayer is not carried by a satellite phone and extra batteries, but by granting swatted house flies their own angels: \u201cWho\u2019s to say this wasn\u2019t the gesture \/ of some lively god pressing a small coin \/ into my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
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