Bright Parallel – Monica Mody

Description

The second full-length collection by San Francisco-based poet, theorist and educator Monica Mody, following Kala Pani (1913 Press), is Bright Parallel (Delhi India: Copper Coin, 2023), a suite of interconnected first-person lyric striations and sentences. Her poems, ranging from the contained to a more extended lyric, explore and examine with such an intensity and detail of interiority. “i want this house of cards to be / shelter,” she writes, as part of the poem “shadown.” Her poems offer a kind of swirl, a sweep of prose poem lyric set as breath, inhaled, inhaled and held. “on tip of your feather, tip of your wing,” she writes, to open the poem “Wild—,” “soaring familiar as bones / cracking open to curve of dance that bends // what spills from your eyes to its own rage, endemic / ache, deep into memory that lives in your muscles, [.]”Hers is a book of exploration and examination, of seeking; simultaneously responding to and reporting on the world as it occurs from a singular point, occasionally rippling out, into family and deeper elements of community. “The poems were written across multiple contexts of solitude and community,” she offers, as part of her “Acknowledgements” at the end of the collection. Through Bright Parallel, Mody works through lyric and the lyric sentence to work through uncertainty and into clarity and beauty. Or, as she writes as part of the extended “How We Emerge”: