‘The Gods of the Age’
— Hannah Cohen
but they saw our darkness
and named us Dark.
It is no secret that I love the potency of a short, compact poem. A short poem that can embrace emotion, setting, and thought into several lines without relying on its optical shock value. With the success of her chapbook, Adeeba Talukder can literally turn words into life, can turn the white space and indents into natural breaths. Considering her process of the poem, the fragmentation of sentences appear like relics: “glimpsed Creation, it was only / half-lit.” Despite the poem’s visual beauty, there is an undercurrent present: who, actually, gets to speak about creating/destroying, and who is “a blurring, a refraction”. Talukder’s poem actively engages with you, and makes you wonder if you’re participating passively or actively in the obscuring or oppression of anything (or anyone) in your life.