Review: Melanin Sun (–) Blind Spots
Danae Younge’s new microchapbook, Melanin Sun (–) Blind Spots, winner of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ annual College Undergraduate Competition, centers ambiguity in its visual strategies, its language, and its imagery. Altering once-static texts and experimenting with punctuation is just the beginning here; nothing is certain or permanent in these poems – except that nothing is certain. Ambiguity serves as Younge’s foundational story and her personal mythology as a biracial person, allowing her work to straddle boundaries imposed by others’ definitions of race, memory, and time.
The collection’s first poem, “Reverberation/Redaction,” begins the exploration of Younge’s grief at the loss of her Black father. The poem questions what this loss means to her identity and whether his death dilutes her inheritances from him: “It can’t just be numbers—a fraction / slipped under his hand-me-down-over-sized suit.” Reverberations – the consequences, extensions, and echoes of actions and sounds – are a recurring image here, as are redactions. The two concepts seem in opposition to each other, since reverberations extend something, while redactions cut something out or off. Beginning in this first poem, though, Younge shows their similarity. The redactions create questions about what was cut out, and the questions extend the life of the poem, opening space for different actions, sounds, and meanings. This is how to live with this world’s relentless ambiguity: by meditating on both difference and sameness, by tolerating uncertainty.
Synesthesia is another method Younge uses to mine experience for ambiguity. At the “celebration of life” that replaces the word “funeral,” the speaker “watched pigment envelop itself like an echo,” bringing color and sound together, concluding “reverberation was redaction.” In other words, the subject heard and felt was the same as the subject that had been made invisible, redacted.
Strikethroughs of words and phrases function as second thoughts, self-corrections, and markers of intellectual maturity. Instead of privileging authority or an insistence on being “right,” poems containing these strikethroughs align with the ideal of being able to not just tolerate ambiguity, but to also acknowledge it as a strength.
Strong images recurring in the poems include fish, braided hair, and musical elements like the cello instrument and the vibrato musical effect. Other images are used to blur the boundaries between past and present and cause and effect, as in these lines from a poem set in a cemetery.
One thing was for certain: ebony skins laid beneath us,
and the name servant after death—like all of life’s most
painful things—was secret in the way it stung…
The repetition of images in this short manuscript lends resonance to them, until the penultimate poem, “Some Things Aren’t Meant to be Metaphors,” which questions whether the comparison between like and unlike in all figurative language means that this way of understanding the unfamiliar happens in a space that’s too comfortable, too secret, too limiting:
Epic similes are the same deal; “like” carves a
crawl space, but there’s not enough room to hide unless
you make a home in the shadows.
An ambitious and thought-provoking collection of poems, Melanin Sun (-) Blind Spots mixes the many reverberations of a biracial identity with a complex poetics of ambiguity.
Listen to this episode of What Else Are We Mad At? to hear more about Danae Younge’s debut poetry collection.