Foreign Native Lisa Samuels Black Radish Books, 2018 Lisa Samuels has published fifteen books of poetry, prose, and memoir and teaches English and Drama at the University of Auckland. Her latest collection, Foreign Native Black Radish Books, 2018, takes feeding as a central life force, the infinitive driving our engagements in emotional circumstance, joyous to tremulous, towards togetherness or, inversely, temperments of separation. Often, both person and place perform this dance of elasticity, weaving in and out of each other and energies of consumption, as in “The city inside you:” “Nearby space as painting and the walls / quiet in the long car so one is bound / with one’s head and mouth.” In “Group hug” (“so you tell me “people are alike” / whose grandeur manifestly ends”) and “Let me be clear,” the book’s first poem, (“besides what’s terrific / trying to eat flowers from my mouth”), the poetics less seek our commonalities in questing cohesion/comprehension of self-identity, versions of couplehood, belonging(s), and life/style exigencies than they do poke at our linkages, querying versions of what we think we already know. There are instances of “we,” “you,” “you’re,” “we’ll/we’ve,” and “I” in these poems, but the book does not build a consistently identifiable first-person narrator or narrative persona. Human interaction with nature, as literal instance — “…a close / structure in our feet that move / awkward with the shells on them / balancing no quarter” (“Here you are open out”) and “Groups of forest / call out.” (Mercy proof) indicate that circumferencing non-human force is what humans need for heuristic life guidance rather than reliance on human relationship. Not to be outdoneoutdone — the book functions as Socratic dialogue at times, investigating our treaties with ourselves and others — “Ratiocintional” asks, “How else do you convey a lettered body / strung on motives?” See this nuance: bodies are not dependable, not responsible for one other, yet, are interchangeable — we all strain and journey, posits Foreign Native, are ‘inkable,’ identifiable. Markings cover our innards, but real introspection about another requires dedication of delicateness and pathos, the job of a beholder. The struggle of selfhood in Foreign Native specifically relates to crowdedness of bodies and material consumption; there is ‘grabability,’ a greediness or desperateness, driving personal questing and intermingling, which is hunger at its most extreme. “Portrait d’une femme” reads, “aligning one imagined earth / with two halves of Belonging / sign right Here irreparable / pole-vault photos welded to the walls,” and in “The Arrival:” “Curling forward in the cheap seats by the coddling / voice the echo country comes from out / a language turns extension home.” The longing for people or places embeds itself in noticing and studying the materiality of things; so, ‘things’ and ‘action’ in Foreign Native are personafiable, taking on specific meaning of their situation (of lusting, interrogating, or a strata in-between) and messaging that objectivity conforms to our vision, not the other way around. The deliberateness and magic of sensuality is a unique consideration: “Sometimes adjectives drop / your curled body with perfume,” (“You can be in my dream if I can be in yours”), and the problematizing of selfhood becomes a lubricating, wanting rubik’s cube. “The Arrival” murmurs, “sweet waft we’re halving.” Shouting out writer camaraderie, “A bird in a plane” begins, “Sitting on a park bench is a form of publishing,” linking settings of place and activity to their rapprochement in the human body. The eventuality of this — arrival is in the human body, activity approaches us, and we define activity by our intersection with it — has a liquidity patterning human and natural world evolution and survival. Foreign Native is inherently an intimate book, pointing to materiality as both made-up and monumental in its implications of a fluctuating self-ness, and to human engagement as a dance that transpires with a firmness, skin-to-skin and skin-to-circumstance. Note: This review is dedicated to the extraordinary and kind Marthe Reed, co-publisher of Black Radish Books and poet, who passed away in April 2018. Visit Black Radish Books' Website

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