Poet and former Watershed reader Jacques Rancourt reviews one of the newest books in the smALL Press Library collection, Latitude, by Natasha Rao. Read more to find out why you should check this book out today!
In Confessions, Augustine of Hippo writes, “It became clear to me that corruptible things are good: … if they were supremely good they would be incorruptible, if they were in no way good there would be nothing in them that might corrupt.”
Like Confessions, the poems of Natasha Rao’s luminous debut, Latitude, exist philosophically in the negative space of possibility between one’s equal potential for virtue and cruelty. The work contains a speaker who is “spurred by [her] / capacity for ruin” as much as she seeks, “some proof / [she] could become improbably gentle, good / as drops of water on turned dirt.” Rao’s poems are both homesick for what was and nostalgic for the present. “How to fossilize a feeling?” she writes in the opening poem; “Happiness is devastating in the past tense” in another.
In the title poem, a sequence of prose sections that speak to and echo other pieces in the book, she writes, “No, what I loved most was the person I could be.” This sizing up of one’s own possibility serves as the emotional current through which these poems are often ladled from.
Like the work of Robert Hass, who Rao evokes in the collection’s epigraph, her own poems deftly possess an aching gentleness carved out sharply by concision. Many of these poems explore the relationships between members of the family, in particular the father, whose love language of duty and sacrifice are at odds with the speaker’s own: “Somehow it is easier to say I hated / practicing piano in the morning // than it is to say I loved / the way you turned the pages for me.”
Lifting away from the portent, Latitude is filled with necessary blips of humor, too. In “Confessional Poem,” the speaker carefully avoids using the names of her beloved’s ex-girlfriends, such as Summer and May, so as not to remind him of their bygone affections: “I say I can’t believe April is over and Finally, the warmest season.” Later, this poem turns towards introspection and the shame that comes from searching for validation: “It was only when I saw my own name in careful handwriting that I shut the [journal] and cried. // I confess: I am selfish.” Many of the poems in this collection achieve such tonal range, offering a spectrum rarely found in debut collections.
What impresses me most is the way that Rao collapses lushness with constraint, desire with contentment, regret with splendor, often in the same poem. Eschewing poetic trends, Rao has written a book that’s pure in its expression of human interiority, sacred in its flesh-warm humanity. No single poem capsulizes Rao’s poetic subject, skill, restraint, and attention to the sensual better than “Divine Transformations,” my favorite from this collection, which ends:
Last week I ate exclusively
the unborn, salmon roe and quail egg
in one luscious bite. The distance between
what I thought I was and what I am
grows. I could have been a kind of fly.
I could have been kind.
