A Portrait in Blues: An anthology of identity, gender & bodies. Selected and introduced by jayy dodd. Platypus Press (2017, 80 pages). $16, paperback.

Reading A Portrait in Blues is like falling into the hush of a winter night, the path back disappearing under snow as the landscape begins to transform. There’s a chill on the air and the threat of getting lost, but there is also Polaris, brighter against the deep blue.

This is not to suggest a constant. This anthology is about bodies—be they star, planet, land, water, animal, poem, or our own, ever-changing forms—and is the body ever constant? Even Polaris is getting smaller, its pulse rate decreasing. Stars, too, experience death. But can a body ever really be defined, either by where and when it begins or when it ends? At the same time, bound by so many forces, can it ever truly be free? These are questions the poems in this anthology ask in voices that are vulnerable and sharp and soaked in blue.

jayy dodd, who selected the poems, says in their introduction: “I’m curious to what we make of ourselves under limitations— it feels easier to transcend when you can point to the barriers of your departure.” These are bodies departing, transforming, yearning, grieving—bodies testing their limitations and relating to other bodies. In Logan February’s “Self-Portrait as Cotyledon,” “A tree falls in the forest & / I am the forest & nothing stops shaking.” jayy dodd speaks to this web of connection: “Our landscapes, bodily & otherwise, don’t exist in vacuums.” So many times in this anthology I drop off a line, and the earth shifts.

The moon, that body whose outfit of light allows it constant transformation, makes several appearances, and powerfully so in Koby Liliana Omansky’s “The Tenderness Intended This”: “Where was this moon when I searched for her? That same night? / Could this laughing, monstrous opulence, / larger than light, be the same tepid sphere I saw / shattered behind a tree, full with shame?” In “No Recital,” Peter LaBerge casts the heart in shadow with “I’m giving / Being the moon a try” and “Moon: please begin / Again.”

These are writers who seem ever conscious of the body, and to be ever conscious of the body, is to be conscious of it changing and dying every moment it’s living. Regret lives here, complicated with gratitude, as seen in Laura Villareal’s “Apology”: “Body, I want to bury you / in fresh, out-of-the-dryer blankets. / Let you bathe in green tea & sunflowers. / I haven’t been good to you.” And assertion complicated by doubt, as in John Stintzi’s “Split /”: “yes, I know as much as you do, / am certain only of uncertainty.” Strength, complicated by tenderness, as in Jonathan Bay’s “Beginning”: “Part of me is always / that beating heart / those weak lungs.”

These poems remind us “how complex we are” (Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah, “the thing expressed”) at the same time jayy dodd reminds us how fragile: “The semi-permeances of the body, physically & beyond, makes all it experiences susceptible to bruising. Flesh blues when ruptured.” These poems, this anthology blues, bruises, and ruptures. It is a deep ache, the kind that reminds you just how alive—and briefly so—you are.

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