FROM: Compulsive Reader
Reviewed by Brian Dunlap
Navigating With(out) Instruments
by traci kato-kiriyama
The Accomplices/Writ Large Press
December 2021, Paperback, 264 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1951628000
In Navigating With(out) Instruments, artist and activist traci kato-kiriyama opens their book of poems, micro essays, and notes to self, with a poem titled “Warning.” It repeats the same sentence six times creating a haunting echo: “warning/a book/of/poetry/is/a/trigger.” Before the book officially begins, the reader knows their poetic philosophy, that poetry’s to confront the hardest truths, personal, political, racial, communal, and familial.
Immediately, in section one titled “ICON 1: Have Abandoned Plane, Walking in this Direction,” the book inhabits this philosophy to confront. kato-kiriyama has reached her 30s, and it’s the time in a woman’s life to have children before it’s too late. That’s still society’s expectation, that women are nurturers to others, not autonomous beings.
It begins with kato-kiriyama’s decision not to have kids, that they make clear they are chronicling their nontraditional path in life. By pushing back against society’s bombardment of parental images—“stop sending paper infants to my doorbell…//cease your tapping/we’re a house of cats,” in the poem “My Periodic Wavering On Pregnancy, circa my 30-something years”—the reader sees a woman of color determined to make her own life, not have it made for her.
This notion expands, as kato-kiriyama ponders in the set of Notes To…, at the end of “ICON 1,” if the memory of the individual and their community can “be passed on outside of the vessel of/DNA.” If so, can the individual/kato-kiriyama, who doesn’t have kids, create a “a pan-generational consciousness/through the past, present, and future in concert with each/other,” if not expressed? kato-kiriyama makes a convincing argument in the negative, as they explicitly express their pan-generational consciousness throughout. Read Rest of Review Here
Brian Dunlap 