Quiet

Quiet is complicated. Victoria Adukwei Bulley interrogates her book’s title in “not quiet as in quiet but”:

as in don’t just do something, stand there / 
as in could & should but wouldn’t /
as in well the British are / so polite / 

A second-person speaker allows the poet to hold an insecure adolescent self with clear-eyed tenderness: 

your stripped upper lip (recoiling still), your clean, dark complexion. lean legs, or the gap between them. the grasp of your jeans at you like a lover that you’d like to leave, exposing the gap. the sign between your feet pointing upwards, tear here.

This gives way to a playful confidence in “ode”: “oh midnight kiss, oh lovebite perfectly circular & raised a little, oh long-nailed orgasmic itch, oh ooze, oh souvenir.” 

Bulley dedicates Quiet to “my mother, who dreamed me first.” Dreams ribbon the book, their meanings manifold. They might be the dubious promises that hair straighteners offer children who look on,

watching our mothers mix dreams 
with a spatula; watching the mirror 
       […] We stared 
at the girl on the box, willing
to be cleaned, even before sin

Dreams might falter: “the first dreams to die / when the ships arrived.” Bulley concludes that “Dreaming is a form of knowledge production / & they don’t want it to be that easy for us,” brusquely finishing: “Shut up about Freud.”

The book moves through sealed interiors to awaken in a “night garden” of possibility. As Quiet draws to a close, the tense is future, the mood subjunctive: 

they live in this, a grammar alive
     in furtherance of life
     in service of its likelihood
they braid the future like a child’s hair
     singing &
sewing bright dark seeds into it.

With six sections, seven epigraphs, and a list of ten titles for further reading, Bulley has concertinaed an exhilarating breadth of ideas into her incisive debut. Quiet augurs a bold career.