Monica Mody, Bright Parallel

 

In the beginning of time, a poet lived with family. Family loved and cossetted her, kept her away from housework + farmwork + roadwork.

She kept letters dancing before her eyes. She with letters festooned on bedpost. She with skin laid out on bed.

In the beginning of time, poet knew not what to remember but paid attention to the call of time. Time sang arias to her. She sobbed. Large-fingered, time folded her like a rag. Time let her see.

In the beginning of time, when nothing lived but stark winds too eerie to see a small figure—running and running—

When she fell down, someone reached out and picked her up.
There I floated, there I lay, before the mouth of time. Retched. (“Fundamental”)

The second full-length collection by San Francisco-based poet, theorist and educator Monica Mody, following Kala Pani (1913 Press), is Bright Parallel (Delhi India: Copper Coin, 2023), a suite of interconnected first-person lyric striations and sentences. Her poems, ranging from the contained to a more extended lyric, explore and examine with such an intensity and detail of interiority. “i want this house of cards to be / shelter,” she writes, as part of the poem “shadown.” Her poems offer a kind of swirl, a sweep of prose poem lyric set as breath, inhaled, inhaled and held. “on tip of your feather, tip of your wing,” she writes, to open the poem “Wild—,” “soaring familiar as bones / cracking open to curve of dance that bends // what spills from your eyes to its own rage, endemic / ache, deep into memory that lives in your muscles, [.]”Hers is a book of exploration and examination, of seeking; simultaneously responding to and reporting on the world as it occurs from a singular point, occasionally rippling out, into family and deeper elements of community. “The poems were written across multiple contexts of solitude and community,” she offers, as part of her “Acknowledgements” at the end of the collection. Through Bright Parallel, Mody works through lyric and the lyric sentence to work through uncertainty and into clarity and beauty. Or, as she writes as part of the extended “How We Emerge”:

We who tell the story
still live

What is remembered lives

This body remembers