Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die: Poems

Organized around the four seasons, the poems in Mulalu's sensory and exciting debut combine surprising, even wry insights ("Afro's gone Medusa again.// Every coil's its own Hydra./ I'm adventuring with a comb") with powerful confessions ("Every day I find myself/ smaller with effort"). In "Argo, My Argo," which opens the collection's "Summer" section, the inanimate envies the animate, "Being alive must be nice,/ says the sink basin, filling// further with myths," complicating and layering Mulalu's investigation of diasporic Black African identity in America. Mulalu invokes other poets, especially Sylvia Plath (in "Aria" and "Frenzy"), for whom "it will only make me feel/ more real to know the pain of your mind." Other poems allude to Brahms and van Gogh, whose ear is described as "lying now without Zyrtec in a field/ abstracted here into this concerto for a single voice," but the allusions never overpower Mulalu's own vision and originality. These inventive, lyrical, and well-crafted poems offer memorable insights at every turn. (Sept.)