Oceanic: love letters to the loveliness of life

After reading half a syllabus dedicated to ancestral trauma, racism, violence, and the pillaging of land, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanic – its levity and peppery kind of sweetness – especially stands out. This is a collection ripe with so much tenderness for the small and big moments of living, reminding us to regard with the world with wonderment and curiosity. Many of these poems are love letters to the loveliness of life.

Nezhukumatathil regularly turns to animals as metaphors, drawing parallels and resource from their distinctive forms of intelligence. To the mortified child whose teacher has butchered her name during attendance, she writes: “Just picture all the eyes as if your classroom / is one big scallop with its dozen icy blues / and you will remember that winter your family / took you to the China Sea and you sank / your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars / the size of your outstretched hand.” The use of second person and the imperative – “Just picture” – indicates that this metaphor may have been true to Aimee as the child going through this humiliation, but it also serves as a kind of advice, an encouragement to always remember how big and beautiful the world really is, especially in moments when the world feels the size of the classroom. 

In one of my favorite poems, Nezhukumatathil sees her love story in the papa penguin who listens for his mate’s return, unwavering. But she doesn’t project; she asks questions. She inquires:

What exactly does the papa penguin register

in a nighttime that lasts two whole months?

During those days of no sun, does he

remember the particular bend

of his mate’s neck, that hint of yellow

near her ears? Or does he hunger for a slip

of hooked squid, worry the grand gulp of air

he must take, the concentration needed

to slow down his own heart?

What I love about this poem is that it isn’t simply a romantic fantasy. She recognizes that while the papa penguin may indulge in brief memories of his mate, he is very likely preoccupied by his own survival and basic needs. She writes: “Valentine, I sing your praises / not because I know you’ll wait for me / like that (though I know you would / if you could), but because you never waver.” It’s not totally clear what she means by “wait for me like that,” but I interpret it as a reference to the Disney fantasies of “cartoon hearts” and soulmates. And I like that Nezhukumatathil draws a distinction between these saccharine notions of love vs. the kind of steadfastness that allows for one’s survival and is linked to the survival of the rest of somebody’s family: i.e. the papa penguin braves the dark waters to collect enough food to feed his family the rest of the winter.

(Confession time!! After reading this poem, I actually copied it by hand and sent it in a letter to my partner, who lives across the country, along with one of my favorite photos of us :) Long distance is hella challenging and I felt inspired towards a gesture of tenderness. Each of us is taking the plunge to pursue our dreams separately for this time – I’m a writer and my partner is an actor – and I'm trusting this will be vital to the deepening of our love story.)

Nezhukumatathil seems to see so much beauty around her and sees herself in such deep relationship to the natural world, writing herself into self-portraits of scallops, Niagara Falls in Winter, C-section scars, and egg-tempera illuminated manuscript from 1352. I also loved “End-of-Summer Haiburn” and I think it encapsulates some of the author’s approach to poetry: “There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still warm-bread this winter.” I feel like Nezhukumatathil “cans” the summer sky into her poetry, spreads “little meteors” with each line in a way as cozy as “still-warm bread.”