There are peacocks honking on the streets, a coyote visiting a movie theater and goats on the main strip of a Welsh town in Michele Wolf’s title poem. Instantly we are back to the terrifying early days of the pandemic when Nature seemed to take its rightful place occupying land that the human has expropriated. That pandemic reality did not last very long. Peacocks have fled once more to the hills. Humans have come back to their savage practices.
This book documents that savagery in essential, searing poems such as”Chokehold, “Shock of the Light” and “International Welcome” while at the same time leaving this grateful reader with other poems of exceeding and delicate beauty. Here is Wolf in “Ladybug”
Where did you come from–red lacquered
Spangle, glistening black-dotted gem?
But later in the same poem, the beautiful picture turns darker.
I still have the ladybug costume I bought
For my daughter, a toddler, for Halloween.
The headband floating two floppy antennae
That wobbled whenever she shifted
Her head. I also saved her pumpkin candy
Bucket and orange-and-black bat pajamas.
Trick or treat? How many mornings
And evenings I dressed her, dressed her up.
I want to ask for what is she dressing her? And why dressed up? What challenges will that daughter face, will we face, in this complex, fratricidal world in which we are raising ourselves and our children?
“Trick or treat?” A simple and profound choice. And what if we say “Treat” and the masked visitor serves a razor blade in his brownie?
Let’s look at the poems that raise alarm bells, that we all should read and reread because their reading helps us see through the glass darkly, helps us understand the plagues visiting our society. Here is
International Welcome
“Put shoes into the cubbyholes and tie them together so
you will not lose them. After the showers, you will
receive hot coffee.”
The hidden Undressing Room at the camp offered a sign
In a half dozen languages. One shower facility, stuffed
To full use, could fit twenty-five hundred “pieces.”
The naked streamed in—a cavalcade of bellies,
Breasts, behinds. The new arrivals, obeying in wave
After wave, having faced the council of guns, moved forward
Wanting to believe, so many believing, they would indeed
Be taking a shower, until the guards at the rear, armed
With truncheons, batted the last of the lined-up prisoners,
Until the bolts on the door’s iron bars were yanked tight.
Those bolts at the end of the poem jolt the reader into levels of shocked awareness. This is more than a cold and uncompromising prison that is receiving new migrants–where they will not be treated with dignity, where instead of showers they will be beaten with truncheons. It is also the reality of death by gas of Hitler’s Final Solution.
In “Chokehold” Wolf pays tribute to George Floyd whose neck was pressed upon until he died. This poem’s dedication and its content is an act of political, social and historical memory.
The Confederate horsemen, bronze heroes
Of the South, are being cracked off their
Pedestals. The protests have blossomed,
A profusion of rose fields rising up worldwide–
As distant as Rio, as Tunis, as Tokyo–to honor
A man pinned against the pavement
While a knee crushed against his neck
And a team of officers lingered nearby.
Who is it who owns the recounting of history?
Who is it who owns a Black man’s life?
For George Floyd 1973-2020
And in “Shock of the Light” Wolf honors Matthew Shepard, a gay man beaten and tied to a post and left for dead in Wyoming. She imagines a red winged blackbird landing on a post beside the dying Shepard. “And no one can find you, except for a red-winged/Blackbird, tipping its head, perched on a post/Beside you, you know it is time, although/Your heart still pumps, your lungs continue/To flap as they filter the wilderness/Wandering in from outside. You depart/With the bird….”
Let us depart in the radiance of Michele Wolf’s palette, her bold strokes on the page. Let us travel with her and the peacocks down to the streets of Mumbai, straight into our consciousness, into our dreams and our sweet reckonings. This is an outstanding book of lyric poems charged with empathy for the beaten, the murdered, the left out.
Indran Amirthanayagam writes poetry in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He is the author of thirty one books of poetry and poetry in translation, including White Space Sonnets (Sarasavi, 2025), Seer (Hanging Loose Press, 2024), The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia, Blue Window (Dialogos Books) The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press 2020),Coconuts on Mars (Paperwall, 2019), Uncivil War (Mawenzi House (formerly TSAR), Canada, 2013), and the Paterson Prize-winning The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose, 1993). Amirthanayagam is a 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellow in poetry, and a past fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the US/Mexico Fund for Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions (www.beltwayeditions.com), edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly; co-curates the reading series Beltway Cafe at the M.L.K. He writes a substack at indranmx.substack.com
Michele Wolf is the author of Peacocks on the Streets, a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize. Her earlier books are Immersion, Conversations During Sleep, and the chapbook The Keeper Of Light. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poetry, The Hudson Review, etc. Her honors include the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, a Maryland State Arts Council literary arts Independent Artist Award, and fellowships from Yaddo, and other writer retreats. She teaches at The Writer's Center in Bethesda. Her website is http://michelewolf.com