Tiphanie Yanique’s ‘Body Logic,’ from her 2015 book of poetry, Wife, speaks of the way ‘the body will fail you.’ This failure, this lie, is always a political failure: the stuff of who gets access to what, who pays, how much, and when.

Under current conditions of the state of reproductive rights, the liberal feminist’s plea to ‘own’ her body postures as a radical call. My pussy, my rights. My body, my property. The abolishment of private property has historically not had a whole lot to say about the trap of body as property. (Historians of slavery know a little more about persons as property. Tell me where the body and the self lie in that calculation.) But maybe it is true that the terror of being born happens through a feeling that we are not self-possessed: we are out of the womb, and firstly, finally, penetrable. A feeling of risk has never left me.

In Sinclair’s ‘Hands:’ mother’s practices of social reproduction are fuzzied by her domestic and service work. ‘Her hands have not been her hands / since she was twelve.’ Later, is it the same mother? ‘Mother says nothing / and turns away, a worse / kind of violence.’ Risk does not quite capture it.

In ‘Dreaming in Foreign,’ after Caliban, we are confronted with the untranslatability of the body. Too, the self. There Sinclair goes again: ‘There I am again. / I am not myself—.’ (20). Another em dash.

When I first started publishing my writing, almost ten years ago, I became obsessed with the em dash. How to use it? Which writers who used it before me used it well? When is too much? Mostly, seriously: what will it say about me? I tended to speak, and still do, toward some idea of assuredness—I always failed—but in writing I wanted as many parentheticals as my editor would allow. In speech, I did not want the other to see me fall. In writing, I wanted to exploit that anxiety of uncertainty, off-putting emphasis, ill-placed asides, and imprecision. The em dash comes in when I feel like I must perform for the page: make sense of my dreams, the things that come to me just because, the juxtapositional impulse, or that undecided, nervous laughter. The em dash is a remnant of an undisciplined thought out into writing.

Earlier this year, I was reading Tiphanie Yanique’s Wife next to Sinclair’s Cannibal in an effort to pair them together. There were wives and cannibals all around me. How hard could it be? But they all resisted my critical hand: the books, the figures, the real. Not because the wife and the cannibal are so distinct, I realised. At the end of the day, while both of these books enact figurative poetics, Sinclair dissolves The Cannibal while Yanique shores up The Wife—through uses of the dictionary, the symbol of the veil, the baby’s dirty mouth, requisite couples therapy, a woman fucked over and too hard.

In her sixteen-line ‘Autobiography,’ Sinclair writes:

I had known what it was to be nothing.
Bore the shamed blood-letter of my sex
like a banishment; wore the bruisemark
of my father's hands to school in silence.

And I see her, whoever ‘she’ is, and a ‘girlself,’ that gendered self that seems named, othered, and separate but is inevitably intertwined with the unmarked self.

‘This is the island. / It is small and vulnerable, / it is a woman, calling.’ So begins Yanique’s Wife. The woman, one can presume, is the wife. But in a dynamic of social hierarchy, all women call, all women wait. In this island and on this woman, according to Yanique, ‘dangerous things live below.’ There are things we cannot know.

The second section of Cannibal centers America more explicitly: the stuff of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia or a brother—another brother—gunned down. In ‘Another White Christmas in Virginia,’ the colour white has so much symbolism it is on the verge of explosion. Even if this experience of racist terror comes from personal experience (born in Montego Bay, Sinclair did an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia), it doesn’t take much to feel repelled by the iconography of America, Santas and Chevys and lawns. It doesn’t take long for someone to get sick of the idea of America. Sinclair almost screams: ‘I long to set fire to all of it.’

The cover image of Sinclair’s Cannibal features a striking detail by artist Wangechi Mutu. If you have ever encountered Mutu’s signature collage work, her shape-shifting figures resist simple gender classification. On the cover of Cannibal is Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006), in which the vagina stands in for a third eye on a collaged facial figure. When I went to buy Sinclair’s book of poems at the bookstore many months ago, the guy working at the checkout asked, ‘Is that what I think it is?’ The layers offer variations, shifts between background and foreground. It was and was not what he thought. Even if cannibalisation ungenders, I was left here in this basic world.

I am tired of explanations. As I offered the guy the best of what Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo might call my ‘black-eyed squint,’ I realised I needed a break.