Judging a Book by its Title

Poetry that escapes the left hand margin attracts me. I did a lot of floating lines in my early years of writing, but am now, sadly, mostly locked to the left margin. Claudia Saleeby Savage spreads her words across these pages in a variety of ways. However the book’s title—First you Must Destroy the World—is a pretty good attention grabber on its own.

Yes there is violence in the book, rooted in Saleeby Savage’s Syrian lineage. But also from that lineage, and spread throughout the book, is love of family, from her grandmother to her own daughter. Time barriers, memory and speculation, are woven throughout.

The beginning of “you shake your head and get something other than sea,” near the end of the book:

“Your mother is dead.  That much is true.
 
The dark ooze she planted into your soft ears before she left—
no matter how you shake it won’t leak out.
If you had a mirror you could search for her face in your own.
If you had a toy rabbit you could remember her soft touch.
You have neither.
 
You have bombs, that much is true.”

Kind of like the old saw about six blind men and an elephant, your perception of this book would vary widely if you saw just a single page or poem. There’s visual poetry, conventional left margin poems, words dancing down the page.

I cannot replicate the works with words, letters, punctuation scrambled across the page.

What ties all this together? Energy is one connection, embodied viscerally by the more visual poems, displaying a wide range of emotions in the more conventionally shaped.

Another connector, and maybe the driving force, is trying to make sense—of herself, her family and heritage, the world past and present. The structures and presentations of the poems must vary because Saleeby Savage is knocking on various doors to find a path toward, or an example of, sense-making.

Several poems in this book refer to her grandmother, Sitti. This one’s “sitti gets to be white as long as she’s behaving/for Nina Simone:”

“don’t silence the woman at dinner who yells her mind.
 
I need her. Like Nina screaming her low piano about those
girls in  Mississippi. (They weren’t hers. They are ours.)
 
Syrians crumble every border after ANOTHER! CHEMICAL! ATTACK!
(Why does it hurt so much when my child isn’t the one that’s burning?)”

The poet’s vision to tie these elements together. The strength and economy of this language, cutting across borders of race, place and time to our shared human core. And other parts of that shared core are humor and sensuality. This is a wide-ranging, changing shape as you change pages, collection. The impact of the material could over-shadow the writing itself, if Saleeby Savage didn’t have such deeply developed language skills.

Here’s an entire poem (she does not capitalize her titles):

in my arms, you’ll feather
 
                                                     you could be my child.
 
I could hold you on my lap as another daughter.    paint circles on the velvet
warmth of your back.    small bone blades might spread wings.
 
in this brief nest rest till you blood, labnehs.  Thick tangy salt, sun
sprays through the window.    dust diamonds your eyelashes.
 
let me look at you. stroke your neck.    Help you release your throat
of lament.    imagine the wind as kind.”

First You Must Destroy the World incorporates pieces of what was, what made us who we are, into the formative present. The past isn’t fate, but a tool and a treasure. The poems re-mind us of dangers and rewards, as well as love, respect and forgiveness. Saleeby Savage bravely opens herself wide to encounter and imagine the worlds of her past and present, so we too can make some—perhaps more emotional than logical—sense of the worlds we come from and those we are now immersed in.

PS—Saleeby Savage and her husband, multi-instrumentalist John C Savage, as the duo Thick in the Throat Honey, have a recording of soundscapes of five poems from this book, under the same title, available at thrumrecordings.bandcamp.com, ramping up the intensity of those poems and surrounding you with it.