Brown Girl Chromatography / Anuradha Bhowmik / 2022
Anuradha digs deep into some truly frightening childhood traumas on this one and lays them flat. She probes the way she defined and sometimes defended, sometimes degraded her Bengali girlhood. This collection of poems has an obsession with identity with frequent repetitions of brown and bengali to add specificity in the experience, even if not necessarily the image. Some might critique that as essentialist but for someone from such a marginalized background being loud is necessary sometimes. The poems were deft and skilled in form and raw in content. For a collection named after makeup, it's really vulnerable and transparent. This feels like a difficult collection to write and I'm proud of Anuradha (she my friend) for her work here and excited for what's next.