Brooke Sahni’s second poetry collection, In This Distance, bristles with yearning. The book’s several dozen poems distill the erotic experience into its elemental parts. In Sahni’s world, the mental and emotional experiences of yearning and ecstasy reach their fullness in physical embrace. The titular poem “In This Distance” contains the words “a scripture born of longing,” a line that captures the essence of this collection.
In This Distance builds on Sahni’s first book, Before I Had the Word, in which Sahni drew upon her dual inheritance of Sikhism and Judaism in her exploration of girlhood, adolescence, and the process of maturation. Her second book is a fitting sequel: more mature yet engaged with tradition. Jewish readers may be particularly drawn to the poems that center the biblical figures of Adam and Eve. The prose poem “Eve Leaves Eden” imagines Genesis’s first woman as fed up with constant companionship in which “the romance has worn off.” Sahni returns to the titular theme in “Circulate,” a multi-page poem that plays with the idea of Adam and Eve reengaging their intimacy after Eve returns to Eden. Other poems draw on the Jewish tradition such as “A Case Against Omitting the O in God” the speaker explains that the “o” in the divine name makes them “think of fullness/the body’s ecstasy cresting at the mouth in the shape of an O.”
Poet and activist Audre Lorde and psychoanalyst and writer Esther Perel are two of Sahni’s interlocutors. “Esther Perel and Audre Lorde Go Dancing” is an imagined conversation between the two. They enter a bar or restaurant with music so loud they “can’t hear the brilliance/coming off of the other” Amidst the cacophony, they delight in the fact that each other is writing before walking, hand in hand, to dance. The poem concludes: “They are ready to write a new scripture. They are ready to dance.” Perel’s skepticism towards monogamy informs the line “Esther says an affair in an attempt to recover a lost part of ourselves and I believe her, too” in “On Contemplating the Future of You, I Pull The Warrior Rune and it says Divine.” Another line invokes Lorde who, like Perel, says “the erotic, like god, lives within our bodies.”
The penultimate poem “Perhaps if we understood desire” suggests that vulgar or slang terms for our intimate parts are more intimate than clinical terms. Testifying to the collection’s combination of the religious and the erotic, the final poem “Trying to Write About God Again.” juxtaposes the experience of writing about bodily pleasure with writing about the Lord.
Readers who flip through the book will notice that no two pages are arranged the same way. Sahni’s employment of a variety of formal poetic structures throughout the book adds to the pleasure of reading it, as each poem is an opportunity to explore a new formal arrangement. “Ode to Esther Perel” contains quatrains praising Sahni’s psychoanalytic muse. The aforementioned “In This Distance” plays with the space on the page, each word a careful distance from the next. Other poems use numbers or stars to separate lines.
In This Distance is an emotionally charged, biblically engaged, and formally creative collection. Its content is accessible and thrilling, while its impressive formal structures make it a delightful read for poets and poetry connoisseurs.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
