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Autowar
A visceral, vital, unblinking debut collection of poems exploring kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site.
We're often told that we are given only what we can bear. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we're made to think we deserve--and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré's debut collection is a record of those scars--not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path.
Each and every poem in Autowars was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person's power and ability--to hurt themself, or others. These poems are powerful evocations of how even our scars have worlds and lives.
here in the dark, me-space
i am insatiable for my flesh
i just can't get enough
of tiny after-wounds
that's me giving, still too soft
for my own teeth
We're often told that we are given only what we can bear. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we're made to think we deserve--and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré's debut collection is a record of those scars--not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path.
Each and every poem in Autowars was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person's power and ability--to hurt themself, or others. These poems are powerful evocations of how even our scars have worlds and lives.
here in the dark, me-space
i am insatiable for my flesh
i just can't get enough
of tiny after-wounds
that's me giving, still too soft
for my own teeth
- GenresPoetry
86 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 21, 2022
According to Assiyah Jamilla Toure, Autowar (Brick Books) didn’t set out to be poetry: it began as notes kept on their phone. How lucky for us that those notes coalesced into such a nuanced, powerful, painful, brutal, magnificent exploration of bodily interaction with the world.
December 27, 2024
adding a rating, though i usually don't do that, because this is by a local artist and published by a small press.
this one has been a long time coming: in february 2023 apparently i bought this thinking that i should read more poetry, and now in december 2024 i have indeed read more poetry, and now finally finished this short book. i liked it a lot. i don't really know how to write about poetry in a review format like this; group discussions and poetry clubs/classes are better. from the acknowledgements touré divulges she wrote these mostly in her notes app on the way to work. i wasn't surprised by this, though i don't mean that at all pejoratively. digital simulacra is central here after all -- an app to replace a notepad seems a fitting compositional medium. the ephemeral permanence. all poetry is working through something i guess, to put it un-poetically. these were especially reflective, reflexive. again, notes-apps-y. in a good way.
silence, fruit, skin, devouring....creative images...i like the mental exercise of poetry. it's like pipping drops of pigment into a glass of water, the ink an upside-down eruption yet contained, constrained.....and then trying to read the stages of its dissipation like countless rorschachs ahaha. this is why i can't write about poetry it's too vague. sometimes i think my mind would conjure an image that would be undermined in the next line building on that image...that's the beauty of it i guess. there is a lot here. performance of the body IRL, online, whatever those even mean. Blackness and queerness and sexual violence. being a product, and being a product of certain people and things. geographies of the body and its resonances, intemporality (word i def did not make up yet is underlined red)....boundaries, blurriness, affectation. oh, "physics" (about their mom) was realllllly good. wow.
TL:DR: touré is exquisite !
i'll copy down some fragments i underlined (extracted from the context of each poem, i know....even so)
beckoning:
"i am in fear of the comings and going / i taste the rot on every fruit" (9)
wishing is not the same as wanting:
"peace is adjacent to theory / me looking for peace is learning theory / learning a theory of hunger / never having been not hungry" (11)
"is this it? i ask the musk / my nose searching / buried in the nape / of another animal" (11)
acidfield
"if a husk is an outer shell, our bones / will be husks for air and children passing / will look upon the sweet cane / sugar yellow of our once bodies // they'll run through fields of us / passing finger over femur / like we once did to our own yellow fields of grasses" (14)
nocturnal
"we, audiences, see creatures swimming in others" (16)
"i cut that air with the song of me breathing" (18)
idolatry
"i will perform this until it feels real" (21)
"let's have all our conversations under this / white sheet with the light coming through" (21)
other i
"writing this, a poem / and that poem there / and somewhere else writing one better / one that would do better there than here / would i do better there than here?" (33)
"every bit as dark, but a little less black?" (33)
"somewhere unreachable but that i know like / every place i ever dreamed of / places i've only eaten at in friends' anecdotes / anywhere i'm copy-pasted in the background of a story / a mess of free associations—elastic memory" (35)
snakeskin
"i don't shed tears for them / don't waste water for skin, pouring out for dry clay / see they shed their skin, shed their skin skin / shed their body's body, shed their corpses // fruit are peeled down to the goodness / to the newest, to the goodest" (48-49)
blurry
"there's the dirt / there's the rub / here's the dirt" (73)
i really like this one
autodeity
this one is just fantastic, i can't isolate a single line
this one has been a long time coming: in february 2023 apparently i bought this thinking that i should read more poetry, and now in december 2024 i have indeed read more poetry, and now finally finished this short book. i liked it a lot. i don't really know how to write about poetry in a review format like this; group discussions and poetry clubs/classes are better. from the acknowledgements touré divulges she wrote these mostly in her notes app on the way to work. i wasn't surprised by this, though i don't mean that at all pejoratively. digital simulacra is central here after all -- an app to replace a notepad seems a fitting compositional medium. the ephemeral permanence. all poetry is working through something i guess, to put it un-poetically. these were especially reflective, reflexive. again, notes-apps-y. in a good way.
silence, fruit, skin, devouring....creative images...i like the mental exercise of poetry. it's like pipping drops of pigment into a glass of water, the ink an upside-down eruption yet contained, constrained.....and then trying to read the stages of its dissipation like countless rorschachs ahaha. this is why i can't write about poetry it's too vague. sometimes i think my mind would conjure an image that would be undermined in the next line building on that image...that's the beauty of it i guess. there is a lot here. performance of the body IRL, online, whatever those even mean. Blackness and queerness and sexual violence. being a product, and being a product of certain people and things. geographies of the body and its resonances, intemporality (word i def did not make up yet is underlined red)....boundaries, blurriness, affectation. oh, "physics" (about their mom) was realllllly good. wow.
TL:DR: touré is exquisite !
i'll copy down some fragments i underlined (extracted from the context of each poem, i know....even so)
beckoning:
"i am in fear of the comings and going / i taste the rot on every fruit" (9)
wishing is not the same as wanting:
"peace is adjacent to theory / me looking for peace is learning theory / learning a theory of hunger / never having been not hungry" (11)
"is this it? i ask the musk / my nose searching / buried in the nape / of another animal" (11)
acidfield
"if a husk is an outer shell, our bones / will be husks for air and children passing / will look upon the sweet cane / sugar yellow of our once bodies // they'll run through fields of us / passing finger over femur / like we once did to our own yellow fields of grasses" (14)
nocturnal
"we, audiences, see creatures swimming in others" (16)
"i cut that air with the song of me breathing" (18)
idolatry
"i will perform this until it feels real" (21)
"let's have all our conversations under this / white sheet with the light coming through" (21)
other i
"writing this, a poem / and that poem there / and somewhere else writing one better / one that would do better there than here / would i do better there than here?" (33)
"every bit as dark, but a little less black?" (33)
"somewhere unreachable but that i know like / every place i ever dreamed of / places i've only eaten at in friends' anecdotes / anywhere i'm copy-pasted in the background of a story / a mess of free associations—elastic memory" (35)
snakeskin
"i don't shed tears for them / don't waste water for skin, pouring out for dry clay / see they shed their skin, shed their skin skin / shed their body's body, shed their corpses // fruit are peeled down to the goodness / to the newest, to the goodest" (48-49)
blurry
"there's the dirt / there's the rub / here's the dirt" (73)
i really like this one
autodeity
this one is just fantastic, i can't isolate a single line
July 28, 2022
a touching, thought-provoking and truly interesting collection of poetry. i’m not someone who enjoys poetry that much, however they really made me appreciate it and enjoy interpreting and analyzing what they were expressing.
March 23, 2023
Utterly devastating. Touré's work is not for the faint of heart, but it captures the unique beauty and horror that comes in the violence inflicted upon us by others - through abuse or isolation - and by ourselves.
Especially by ourselves.
This wasn't a very easy read for me, but once I picked it up, I simply could not put it down. And despite its brutality and intensity, the beauty of Touré's prose has ensured that her imagery still stays in my head, long after I finished the last poem.
Especially by ourselves.
This wasn't a very easy read for me, but once I picked it up, I simply could not put it down. And despite its brutality and intensity, the beauty of Touré's prose has ensured that her imagery still stays in my head, long after I finished the last poem.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews