Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "At the Drive-In Volcano"

"The problem with skin/is not how it keeps all of you in.../ But how it remembers and remembers even if/ the grey pocket in your brain says forget," writes Fredonia-based poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil in one of the 56 dazzling poems in her second full length collection At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press). The book was recently awarded the Balcones Poetry Prize as the best collection of poems published in 2007 by the Austin, Texas based Balcones Center for Creative Writing.

Reading through a volume of Nezhukumatathil's poems is like grabbing onto the trapeze bar at a circus of the senses: one moment your hand brushes the skin of a sand shark in a touchpool,  the next you're dodging serpent heads and anti-feminist barbs at the Medusa's Hair Salon, sampling deadly Fugu fish at an unlicensed sushi restaurant, or stealing a kiss from Judas in your community church's production of the Passion Play.

Of the generation of American poets to launch their careers over the past decade, Nezhukumatathil may be the most successful at balancing a well-crafted formal restraint with an unabashed exoticism of the senses.  No less an epicure than a natural historian, a pop cultural maven than a global village storyteller, her work excels at finding the possibilities in cultural difference and inventing a new lexicon for corporeal desires.

Born in Chicago in 1974 to a Pan-Asian family--her mother is from the Philippines and her father from the state of Kerala on the southwest coast of India (where long surnames are the norm)--Nezhukumatathil grew up in Iowa, Kansas, Arizona, and during her junior high school years, nearby Gowanda, NY before her family settled in Beavercreek, Ohio.  She attended Ohio State University as both and undergraduate and graduate student, receiving her MFA under the mentorship of poet David Citino (to whom At the Drive-In Volcano is dedicated), before being appointed Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Since 2001, she has been associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia, where she has won both campus wide and SUNY wide teaching and scholarship awards.

If Nezhukumathil's 2003 debut collection Miracle Fruit (winner of Tupelo Press' 1st Book Award and the Global Filipino Literary Award)  explored hyperrealistic representations of the Catholic iconography and lore of her mother's native Philippine Islands, then At the Drive-In Volcano (the title poem refers to an actual tourist attraction in St. Lucia which she visits with her husband on their honeymoon) focuses more poignantly on her father's Keralan legacy.  "You are the father of my father and I am the mosquito of the rain barrel," she addresses her grandfather in '"What the Mosquito Gives."  In "Origin of the Mango," her parents offer contrasting mythical accounts of how the fruit found its way to the Philippines.  Her father's account involves the intervention of a beneficent wind; her mother's the drama of a virgin suicide. 

Perhaps Nezhukumatathil's most significant advance in this volume, however, is in her development of a faltering, self-critical voice as well as the verse equivalent of an unreliable narrator, both of which broaden her palette as an artist.  In "If You Take the Fins Off A Shark" her love struck narrator self destructively overreaches with her metaphors until the poem as speech act lies in shards at her feet.  "Bee Wolf" introduces us to a poet whose need for a lover is so urgent (think Billie Holiday) she envies the stinging power of a female wasp.  "After Challenging Jennifer Lee To Fight" is about a young girl's disquieting discovery of her own capacity for aggression.  "Oriental," perhaps her most subversive poem to date, deconstructs the ethnic identity politics that have been projected onto her, even as it concedes that they are the foundation of her own literary persona.

--R.D. Pohl