Eleanor Thomson
No one in my family immigrated fewer than five generations ago. I’m fluent in the language of my country. But reading Elina Katrin’s “The Crossing of Our Accents,” the barrier between me and a family of Syrian-Russian immigrants vanishes. Katrin calls upon descriptions of the physical experience of speech—“I feel Russian dangling from my tonsils”—to bring the reader alongside the speaker. With her simple but evocative metaphors for life in a foreign language—her father “bending” Russian like “a sledge hammer driving railroad spikes into tracks”—Katrin evokes the comfort of a mother tongue and the violent, beautiful compromise between two languages made by immigrants across the world. “The Crossing of Our Accents” renders cultural differences between the speaker and the reader irrelevant and illuminates the experiences of a family halfway around the world from me!
Xander Graustein
Reading poetry feels comforting in a way that cannot be found as easily in other pieces of writing, especially when a poem talks to the reader directly such as in “The Crossing of Our Accents” by Elina Katrin. When I read poetry, I don’t feel like I’m giving myself to the poem; instead I am only lending an ear similar to helping a friend. The lending of an ear is specifically evoked through the line “You sound like a foreigner” said by her mother in the poem. The phrase hits hard, but I didn’t feel myself wanting to know more, I felt content with what was given. Whereas when you give yourself to a poem, you want to know more, needing clarity, whereas when you are lending an ear. Instead of falling into a world of someone’s desire, you watch from above, not giving or adding.
Melodie Ashley
Probably every woman knows all too well the feeling of walking with “keys like claws,” as depicted in Tanisha Bose’s powerful poem. Her words took me back to a time when I was just 12-years-old, and my gym class had a visiting police officer who reviewed such methods of protection with us wide-eyed little girls. For some, the lesson came too late. For others, it would not be enough.
Some of us had developed early, having C- (or even D-) cups before we had even exited elementary school. Some were still flat-chested and awaiting their first menses. It didn’t matter. Any one of us could easily be prey. While the more “buxom” among us were body-shamed and blamed for the unwanted attention, we were also taught that many attacks were only about control—and we were “all just such easy targets.”
I wondered if an officer also visited the boys’ gym class to teach them how to be safe—or to teach them not to be predators. No, instead the boys would have received martial arts training or something similar, without the additional requirement of key-claw prayers or “how to disappear into shadows.” (Martial arts for the girls might actually have been more useful!)
I appreciate when a poet can express so much emotion with just a few words. Bose does this incredibly well with this poem. Her line, “I don’t want to be fearless,” reverberates deep into the psyche of any survivor or any potential victim. We don’t want to have to be fearless. And, while we may not want to be left alone by everyone, we certainly do not want to feel “hunted” everywhere we go. We just want to feel safe in our own neighborhoods, in our own homes, in our own skin—regardless of how much “safety training” or experience we’ve had.
Read Tanisha Bose’s “My Body“
