My Body Lives Like a Threat by Megha Sood (review)

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Reviewed by:

• My Body Lives Like a Threat by Megha Sood
• Austin Alexis (bio)

my body lives like a threat
Megha Sood
FlowerSong Press
https://www.flowersongpress.com/store-j9lRp/p/my-body-lives-like-a-threat
96 pages; Print, $18.00

Megha Sood's debut full-length poetry collection, My Body Lives Like a Threat, is a model of contemporary poetry at its most political. Centering around timely issues such as police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration policy, bodily autonomy, and fake news, the book is an example of a poet's passionate engagement with the public turmoil and crises of our time. Even a glance at the table of contents reveals the collection's predilection, since the book is divided into five sections with bluntly political associations: I: Black Truth; II: War and Peace; III: My Body Is Not an Apology; IV: A Just Immigration Policy; V: My Body Lives Like a Threat.

The first section references a number of deaths of people of color, particularly Black men, at the hands of police officers (or biased citizens) in recent years. One poem, "A Nation in a Chokehold," ends with a list of victims of law enforcement: "Here the nation remembers: / Eric Garner, Briyonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd / Here the nation learns again how to breathe / Freely!" (the italics are Sood's). She uses them to emphasize the importance of each individual life and to exclaim over the senseless demise of these individuals. The poem "An Act of Self Defense" is dedicated to Ahmaud Arbery, and alludes to his mother's grief over his death, which ironically occurred while he was peacefully jogging in a neighborhood in Georgia and was not practicing his "right to the Second Amendment" to bear arms. Other poems in this section use the vocabulary associated with police misconduct: chokehold, asphyxiated, "broken prison system," lynched, police gun, "protest-laced streets." The poet stresses the universality to abuse in "Does Hurt Have a Gender?" by ending that poem with these interrogatory lines: [End Page 107]

Do screams have a religion too? Do cries have a race?Does hurt have a gender? Do wounds have a nationality?

Does your tongue curl into sin when you call out my name?Does the triteness of ideologies still mollify your pain?

Some of the poems in this section of the book are prose poems, as if the extremity of the violence that is chronicled is too disturbing to be rendered in verse. Two such poems—"The People We Love, the People We Care" and "A Revolution by Choice"—emphasize the isolation of activism against abuse as well as the continuing struggle to combat abuse.

The second section takes an international turn, as the poems recount such events as tensions between Iran and the United States in the first weeks of 2020; the genocides in Bosnia, Sudan, Iraq, Rwanda, and Syria; a "home burnt down to ashes," which could take place anywhere; and poems that evoke God and prayer in the face of war-torn scenarios.

Though not explicitly about abortion rights, the third section makes many references to the body, blood, womb, and birth. Because the poems in this section are mostly written in the first person, as opposed to the third-person poems of the earlier parts of the book, this section, titled "My Body Is Not an Apology," has a personal and intimate feel. Lines such as "I don't want you to comfort me in the middle of the night / only to unravel my pain in the morning" and "truth gaping through the open wound" are characteristic of this section, where the senses and physicality replace the overtly political language of the collection's earlier parts.

The fourth section, "A Just Immigration Policy," juxtaposes the power of government, with its "AK 47 rifle" and "U.S. Border Agents destroy[ing] supplies left for migrants," against the vulnerability of immigrants as they seek refuge in the United States. Despite their fragility, many of the migrants muster a defiant tone: "I will seep my way through / I don't need a messiah." Ironically, sometimes the anxiety of the poems' speakers comes across when the character declares...