Last Seen, by Jacqueline Jones LaMon
Inspired by “case histories of long-term missing African American children,” the author hones in on the spaces left behind: teachers, siblings, parents, friends, lovers. Some poems focus on the moment where it happens - the image of a woman at a grocery store, a stroller suddenly empty. More often, though, LaMon writes about the aftermath, the “vacancies/your tongue finds at random, learns to penetrate/like love” (62).
The poems are separated into five sections. The first and last of these sections are arranged into polygraph questions. The second section, “The Elsewhere Chronicles,” widens its scope to multiple stories, although individual names or incidents aren’t mentioned. The middle section, Boy Met Girl, follow a narrative, circling through significant locations.
The fourth section is titled The San Francisco Sonnets; these poems seem to follow what WBUR calls the “American Sonnet.” There is not necessarily a consistent rhyme scheme across the poems, although all are 14 lines and do have a consistent meter. This section focuses on the individual people a missing person leaves behind: a prom date, a teacher, a cousin, a father, a boyfriend, etc.
The last section returns to the polygraph. Following similar questions as the first section, these last poems remind us of the missing and the haunted, and perhaps the fragile space between those two states. “You, too, were in those waters, not that day but dates before/covered at once with a mosaic of fragments...Each time, you understand you could die like this, too convoluted to find your way/to air” (60).
In addition, LaMon reminds us that there are always missing people, even when “they call off the rescue...it is no one they show on the news,” and throughout her collection, analyzes how we interact with those empty spaces the missing have left behind.
Buy the book: https://www.bookdepository.com/Last-Seen-Jacqueline-Lamon/9780299282943?ref=bd_ser_1_1
A review: http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2011_05_017608.php
A review: http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2011_05_017608.php
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