Splinters Are Children of Wood

<p>The wildly unrestrained poems in <i>Splinters Are Children of Wood</i> Leia Penina Wilson's second collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry pose an increasingly desperate question about what it means to be a girl the ways girls are shaped by the world as well as the role myth plays in this coming of age quest. Wilson an afakasi Samoan poet divides the book into three sections linking the poems in each section by titles. In this way the poems act as a continuous song an ode or a lament revivifying a narrative that refuses to adopt a storyline.</p><p>Samoan myths and Western stories punctuate this volume in a search to reconcile identity and education. The lyrical declaration is at once an admiration of love and self-loathing. She kills herself. Resurrects herself. Kills herself again. She is also killed by the world. Resurrected. Killed again. These poems map displacement discontent and an increasing suspicion of the world itself or the ways people learn the world. Drawing on the work of Bhanu Kapil Anne Waldman Alice Notley and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Wilson's poems reveal familiarity and strangeness invocation and accusation. Both ritual and ruination the poems return again and again to desire myth the sacred and body</p>