Poetic Book Tours: You're the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened by Arisa White

Synopsis:

Angular, smart, and fearless, Arisa White’s newest collection takes its titles from words used internationally as hate speech against gays and lesbians, reworking, re-envisioning, and re-embodying language as a conduit for art, love, and understanding. You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened works through intersectional encounters with gender, identity, and human barbarism, landing deftly and defiantly in beauty.

My views:

The first thing I felt about "You're the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened by Arisa White" is that it is very liberating. Each and every poem is about love. Not the fairy tale kind but the everyday kind which sustains. I won't say these are spiritual but are visceral, the kind which touch the gut. The poems are like songs of set to tune. Those soulful songs we all love to listen to, in certain moods. With deep feelings, these poems take us to that realm of deep thoughts. We sit back and contemplate. It ceases to matter what kind of relationship. Love is love, irrespective of who loves whom...the race, gender, social ladder is irrelevant. Eroticism is not something which has to be hidden. It can be flaunted subtly, sensually and is to be celebrated.

Tenderness touches the loneliness, a paradox in itself but isn't that how it works? 

I loved the following poems....

I will read Arisa White again and again....

tail

There are little words

that can fit in little places

if you say them small enough.

To fit a song into a pore

you have to be prepared

for the day it will sweat.

If words could stick on people,

if spoken, they would become

a different creature.

Blinded and you’re turned

five times around. Nothing

in you knows what it knew.

It’s the best part of the game:

Prick the girls you like best

while pinning on the donkey’s tail.