Book Review

Book Review On Ama Codjoe’s ‘Blood Of The Air’

On Ama Codjoe’s Blood of the Air An ode to Black women's embodiment

Nadia Alexis

December 6, 2023

Ama Codjoe’s extraordinary debut poetry chapbook, Blood of the Air, conveys a sense of urgency, vulnerability, and Codjoe’s mastery of the poetic craft. Winner of Northwestern University Press’ 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, Blood of the Air explores narratives of women and women figures who have lived, lost, resisted, been subject to breaking and other people’s definitions, and who have reclaimed their breaths and freedom. A palpable concern of the collection is examining grief and what it looks like to cope in the aftermath of loss and to live under the threat of violence, particularly in considering the experiences of Black women.

It opens with “Burying Seeds,” a poem written for Malcolm X’s wife Betty Shabazz. “I want a desire that could be mistaken / for grief to cloud my face, to make me shudder, to twist / my mouth into a cry,” proclaims the speaker in a display of longing and an openness to confront pain similar to the pain found in many of the other poems.

Codjoe’s weaving addresses love, familial relationships, how we move through time, and how we contend with the inevitability of various types of loss. She writes:

Grief is the bride of every good thing,
Betty Shabazz reminds me. I’m wearing a veil the
shape of a waterfall, which is also the shape of
my mother’s dress falling from her shoulders.
Through its fabric, I can see a cloud turning into
a horse and a place that could be a star—

The speaker longs and longs and finds mirrors in the aches of others. In new ways, readers can see loss as a thing that changes how one grasps at the world.

In an ekphrastic poem that bears the title of Lorna Simpson’s 2016 painting “Head on Ice #5” and pulls text from Simpson’s 1986 photograph “Waterbearer,” Codjoe gives us a portrait of a woman who resists containment and tradition:

She wasn’t cut out to be a housewife
She undressed in the middle of the night
She wasn’t cut out to be a soccer mom
She was hot
And she kicked off the covers
She saw him disappear by the river
She peeled the apple skin Into one long ribbon
Until she lay naked
In the grass

This woman who “on her head / she wore a glacier / drifting / like a wig,” becomes her own planet and makes her home where she alone desires. This poem sings a different tune than the title poem “Blood of the Air,” wherein Codjoe addresses the Greek mythological story of Zeus and Leda. Each new line of the poem begins with a number, which slows down the pacing and gives readers the opportunity to come to their own conclusions about truth and agency.

In “She Said,” one of most gripping poems in Blood, Codjoe uses white space, references to holes and torn pages, along with quoted language from trials and hearings on sexual violence in ways that force readers to contend with what it means to experience trauma and be retrautamized by legal proceedings and other people’s power. This poem holds fragmentation and collision and violence and disappearance and bodies resisting hell. Codjoe’s interest in confrontation does not stop there. Her Aunt Jemima poems are informed by Betye Saar’s subversion of the mammy figure in her 1972 sculpture titled The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. The use of repetition, muscular verbs, and tonal shifts contribute to Codjoe’s honoring of Aunt Jemima and her reimagining of this figure’s symbolism and fate.

By a similar token, in “Nasty Woman” Codjoe offers a poem that is partly homage to funk musician and queen Betty Davis. The speaker announces:

inside me a nasty gal growls like the gravel
racing beneath a motorcycle, louder than the
engine chirring inside. “There’s always been a
bird inside me,” Betty Davis said. And because
I’ve learned to decipher one black bird in a mob
of black birds, I know the bird inside her inside
me is either raven nor blackbird nor grackle
I can tell

This symbolism and concern with freedom and flight is reminiscent of folklorist Virginia Hamilton’s 1985 tales in The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales. Ultimately, Codjoe’s nasty woman is because the bird is because Betty Davis is because she is.

Within Codjoe’s poetry there is blood but there is also hope and the will to live. In the final poem “Le sacre du printemps,” the poet writes:

“I vowed to feel as alive as the woman who— / in a rite of spring—must dance herself / to death…”

While many of the women in the collection have experienced violence and deep pain we also see women be emerging, wild, inquisitive, unmasked, and unshackled.