Review of poetry collection “My Body Lives Like a Threat” published in American Book Review, Fall 2023

I’m elated to share the news that the book review of my debut full-length poetry collection ( “My Body Lives Like a Threat”, FlowerSong press, 2022) has been published in the coveted American Book Review. I am extremely grateful to Austin Alexis for writing the extensive and gorgeous review. Also, I am grateful to Associate Editor, Barry Wallentine for his support in making this happen.

In 2009, an agreement between American Book Review and Johns Hopkins University Press allowed online editions of its past issues to be available through the database ProjectMuse.

The American Book Review is an award-winning, internationally distributed publication specializing in reviews of published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women’s presses. For over forty years, ABR has been a staple of the literary world.

ABR is now edited at the University of Houston-Victoria and published by University of Nebraska Press.

You can read the review in the latest issue (” Rethinking Classics”, Fall 2023) of ABR here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/913424Excerpt from the brilliant review by Austin Alexis

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?

Happy Poetry!!

Megha Sood