I received Salt by Nayyirah Waheed as a Christmas gift -- I'd never heard of her or of her poetry before, but I'm always happy to give contemporary poets a try.
There's very little information available online about Waheed herself - I tried to look her up in order to perhaps put her work into context -- but her poetry touches a lot on race, and how the world relates to Africa and Africans. There are some pretty hard-edged critiques about tourist culture, and also about the divide between Africans and African-Americans.
The poems that stuck resonated more for me were those that had to do with personal relationships -- the one in the attached photo in particular really hit me where I live.
However, I will say that as far as micro-poems go (that's what I call these), they're not really my favorites. I do sometimes enjoy the format, but frankly most of these were not evocative enough to really make me feel strongly about them. Many of them felt like stuff you jot down in your phone while riding the train, formatted in an "interesting" way, and then compiled. And while I'm sure the extremely stark design of the book would appeal to many people, it felt very empty to me.
Although a few of them were thought-provoking, I don't really feel like I got as much out of this as I'd like. This one is probably not going to win a place on my already tightly packed poetry shelf.
*“remember,
you were a writer
before
you ever
put
pen to paper.
just because you were not writing
externally.
does not mean you were not writing
internally.”
―
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