Ricantations
will reinforce the perception of Collins Klobah as superb poetic storyteller with a compassionate and radical womanist vision, alert to the multi-layered reality of Puerto Rican life, where shiny modernity gives way to spirit presences. There are absorbingly reflective poems on Juan Carreño de Miranda’s paintings of an hyperphagic child, a stray horse that hangs around the poet’s property, homunculi in glass bottles in a teaching hospital, the keeper of a butterfly farm, a high-wire circus family, and the irony of Nathan Leopold becoming the expert on Puerto Rican bird life. Poems begin from the most fantastic premises—a Che Guevera club in heaven with prizes for the coolest Che impersonator—then line by line open up her island’s secret heart, revealing a society under multiple pressures even before Hurricane Maria, about which the title poem offers a brilliantly hallucinatory picture.