Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS by Rosebud Ben-Oni

Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS Reviews

• 
  rosalind

  270420: quarantine buddy read #4 with keagan! gonna hold off rating/reviewing until after i talk to him.
  
  290420: update: there were a few poems i thought were good ("dancing with kiko on the moon," "más dolor," "{turn around}," "stepping away with diego baez") so i'm not giving this one star, but i hated reading it. a bunch of the poems both had every line start with a capital letter and then had no capitalization otherwise, including proper nouns, which i found so aggravating that i just started skipping poems. like who let this happen. admittedly that's a personal preference but i found it so distracting that i didn't really process these poems' content. but keagan really liked it a lot and said he thought it was fun! so that's definitely just my subjective take as someone who was once a copy editor and psychically and/or physically cannot overlook quirks of grammar/syntax/etc that irk me.
• 
  Emily Pérez

  Reviewed this amazing book for RHINO...here's an excerpt:
  
  Throughout, Ben-Oni’s speaker gallops forward. The last poem, “I Guess We’ll Have to Be Secretly in Love with Each Other & Leave It at That,” celebrates things that will never be: “oh the places we won’t go, // to not airbnbing / haciendas of airy / rooms & canopy beds,” and yet retains joy for what once was: “To hours we made horses between nightfall / & war.” Ben-Oni’s turbocharged collection teaches us not to fear the pain of the past, even as that pain eclipses the heart.
  
  
  https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/turn-...
• 
  Mariposa

  One of the most original voices out there. A queer, experimental Latinx ballad to family, lovers, childhood and finding you way (but "not always the way back") and celebrating even the many mistakes and hardships. It's hard to choose among these gems, but my favorite poem is the last one, "I Guess We’ll Have to Be Secretly in Love with Each Other & Leave It at That." Here's an excerpt:
  
  "To splinters & spitting
  the names I’ll never
  curse you
  
  in kitchen inferno [when burning certain animals]
  without remorse. To your most exquisite
  stews & fermented
  cabbage jars
  I won’t break
  rushing
  
  to catch a broken down train
  To that first train we missed.
  To falling off & eroded hoofprint.
  
  To the city you saved
  by sticking a scorched trainer
  in sliding door &
  
  what’s so wrong
  
  with hell anyway. To
  
  happiness
  as a betrayal of what is happening
  to people we love
  & to people not just waiting around to die.
  To love as resistance but not always
  
  the way back. To can’t I can’t I."
• 
  Lynn Melnick

  I was so honored to review this book for Jewish Currents. Here is what I wrote:
  
  This suspension between worlds also features in Rosebud Ben-Oni’s phenomenal second collection, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS. Ben-Oni’s writing embraces Jewishness as it intersects with her Mexican and queer identities, resisting persistent limitations on mainstream Jewish narratives. Her poems reflect a diasporic kaleidoscope; they travel to Manhattan, Israel, Hong Kong, the Texas border, the Kentucky Derby, the moon.
  
  Like the other books discussed here, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS wrestles with difficult subjects, in­cluding gun violence and abusive relationships. The propulsion and scope of Ben-Oni’s poems—engaging everything from biblical figures to ’80s music—give each word an exhilarating amount of power. In “All the Wild Beasts I Have Been,” Ben-Oni shines in her ability to write what feels like an ever-reverberating amount of meaning into each line, here illustrating the complexities of assimilation and interfaith marriage:
  
  I burned the fields
  I burned the wildflowers suddenly
  I prayed for forgiveness
  Kicked the door in
  All the doors in Jerusalem
  Now uncles now aunts now cousins
  Calling on my wedding day
  Why they ask can’t I understand
  They will not under any law
  Any sun
  Any surfacing
  Sanction my marriage
  
  Ben-Oni, like sax, Kaminsky, and Stone, reimagines a Jewish canon as she writes it. In “If Cain the Younger Sister,” she begins, “My brother is a whitewashed synagogue . . .” and later continues:
  
  He promised I was a complete
  Mensch and mother’s family too
  Ofrenda of flower, skull and bread.
  At ten he solved a dispute
  By reciting Kaddish
  On the Day of the Dead.
  My brother would bury me if he had to.
  
  turn around, BRXGHT XYXS audaciously owns its otherness, traveling the world—and the universe—without losing sight of the United States we now inhabit.
  
  Living and writing as an American Jew in the 21st century often feels frightening and isolating. But being in these poets’ company make it less so. As we together reshape the canon of Jewish poetry, we have the opportunity to remake it in the image of a wider Jewish community than has ever before been represented. In so doing, we can bring out not only new understandings of our community’s struggles, but also insight and beauty beyond anything we’ve ever known.
  
  The whole review is here:
  https://jewishcurrents.org/remaking-t...
• 
  Janet Rodriguez

  Informed by pop-culture, Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS takes bold risks and does not disappoint with its beautiful language. Ben-Oni is continuing to find her rich and important voice on the poetry landscape.