A review by ceallaighsbooks
The Babies by Sabrina Orah Mark

challenging emotional lighthearted mysterious reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? N/A
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.5

“She is obsessed with the notion that the little birds were taken from her. They were my little birds, humming. Not theirs. She is so radically unconscious she may never be remembered. My little humming birds, not theirs.” — from “The Necklace”

TITLE—The Babies
AUTHOR—Sabrina Orah Mark
PUBLISHED—2004

GENRE—prose poetry
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—war & genocide, abandonment of person & place, love as seen through funhouse mirrors, presentation and perception, the lost & the found, memories, skipped motherhood & the inheritors of the future

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—Sabrina Orah Mark’s column for The Paris Review is my favorite so it was fun to read a different medium by her even if it went entirely over my head. 😅

“Sometimes, Beatrice, someone is assigned when     there is no one else. It is too late for you, Beatrice,     and it is too late for you to dig for me up their fresh hooves, their fresh hooves,   in your terrible smock.” — from “Interlude”

Ok I’ve been sitting on this “review” since I wrote it while reading and just after finishing the book and I’m just going to publish it like it is because 🤷🏻‍♀️🤣

I tried to navigate these poems by instinct, gazing across and beyond their surfaces to try to see the deeper parts—a sort of cross-eyed scrying past the bubbles and flitting shapes and shadows of the words. An echo of an image here, an itch, a recalling there. An impenetrable beauty. Silence. Perhaps I’ll try again later...

Peering through glass windows, breathing a clearing fog, wiped away with the callous of a palm, roof fingers across my brow to see through the glare into the darkness. But the lights are on. I see something deeply relevant: a wedding? a birth? a prayer? I can’t make out the figures, can barely make out the words dancing silently across their lips. What are they saying? “Call me Berlin. Call me Your Last Descension.” These words mean nothing to me.

But I still loved the experience and the way Mark uses language and structure in her poems. I particularly liked “Box Three, Spool Five”, “The Necklace” (Frida Kahlo vibes), “Non Vixit”, and especially “Interlude”—the Beatrice poem.

Afterword: *Is* it possible that this collection is written in some kind of poets’ code? (see “The Ledger”, p. 58) Or perhaps this is just the hidden meaning behind the Goat Song… “zwangzug, zwangzug, zwangzug…” “where is the meaning? where is the meaning? where is the meaning?” I need to take another poetry class. 😂

“He said, a starving octopus has been known to eat her own heart.” — from “The Black Umbrella”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

TW // the Holocaust (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
  • Wild Milk, by Sabrina Orah Mark
  • Tsim, Tsum, by Sabrina Orah Mark—currently reading
  • ‘Happily’: Sabrina Orah Mark’s fairy tales inspired column for The Paris Review
  • Aimee Nezhukumatathil—who’s written some of my favorite prose poems
  • Content Warning: Everything, by Akwaeke Emezi—more excellent prose poems