The Daily Glance: 199 Japanese Names for Japanese Trees

Sascha Aurora Akhtar's second book 199 Japanese Names for Japanese Trees is filled with hauntingly beautiful sounds.  That's not really the main idea of the book, but it is what strikes me first when reading it, and the poems sound quite different from the poems in her first book, The Grimoire of Grimalkin.

How to become

a siren swell

lacey vines

I am entangled in

my end of day

Each of the individual poems is filled with evocative images, and each pushes us off into ideas that are unconstrained, that keep going well past the poem's boundaries; still, the entire collection feels like it bleeds over so that it feels like one giant poem.

I am going

two ways

& poetry is the fuselage

they will find

my twisted body

conjoined with

The narrator in the book seems to be searching for answers with poetry, though it's not clear what the questions are.  The back cover tells us: "The poet was interested in the idea of 99 names of Divine Power in Sufi philosophy, with the 100th name being a secret."  That's fascinating, but I didn't notice it much while reading the book.  The poems are short and quietly questing, and to me, that makes them a joy to sit with.