Village
The macaronic poems in Village, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s second full-length collection, revel in cacophonous cascades of raucous soundplay (“gout gonna get granny golly ginger snaps peach schnapps pepsi & vodka on the rocks in a tall glass”) and the visual arrangement of linguistic fragments from over a half-dozen languages—primarily Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Portuguese, but also German, Latin, Arabic, Quechua, Diné, and Yoruba—which litter the page in crisscrossing zig-zags and rigid squares, like city blocks. Instead of line breaks or virgules, the poet uses interpuncts and double colons, and these unconventional choices add to the originality of Diggs’s composition, which borrows from public and visual arts in exciting ways.
A series of poems entitled “Performance” relays instructions for the funeral of “The Artist” (“i would like an obituary notice in the form of a Bop poem”). Elsewhere, a speaker proposes a monument to the heroin addicts of Harlem who, “counter to commonly held perceptions of drug addicts [...] saw us, the daughters of men, as worthy of a childhood momentarily free of trauma.” “Artist’s Statement” envisions a memorial to “those, like the Artist’s mother, who were not successful,” while questioning “what is impossible w/out / resources w/in a stable, safe, & sober village.”
The speaker’s complicated relationship with her mother forms the book’s wobbly emotional core, and in “tending to drunk mothers,” the speaker laments:
attrition for the pickled child of a blitzed mother :: what the
blood
never taught ::
what hand-reared ill parent thought they taught.
expectations stay unexpected cause shit, they old.
In “The Last Days of Pompeii: An Installation,” an ars poetica inspired by performance art:
The Artist seeks to offer a type of medicine that makes well all victims of
domestic abuse
all victims of binge drinkers
all victims of war veterans.
the performance is a ceremony. The Artist is making herself well.
