Omotara James’ debut poetry collection Song of My Softening is unapologetic, muscular, and affirming. Startlingly interior, it is a meditation upon and interrogation of the body — specifically, “fat and queer and female and black” bodies — and its ironclad link to the fraught relationships we have with ourselves. Particularly, James celebrates the body in its naked entirety, regardless of the shape it assumes. 

We are taken on this poetic journey through a bifurcated structure. Chopping up her poetry collection into two major partitions — the first entitled “The Sacrifice,” the second “The Feast” — James observes a startling transformation of sorts, from expiatory poetry that cedes the ego to festive poetry that indulges in unabashed self-celebration. Within both sections, further subdivisions exist:. tTitles “Brass” and “String” constitute the former, whereas “Drum,” “Wind,” and “Piano” constitute the latter. All of which comment upon the sensibilities of the poems contained in that subdivision — for example, just as “Brass” parallels a quality of daring boldness, so James’ persona is emphatically loud and thick-skinned. 

I am particularly drawn to the way in which James’ poetry book unravels at the start. The title itself — Song of My Softening — immediately locates James’ poetry in a place of change. “My Softening” would suggest a prior rigidity and harshness. She connotatively gestures towards a body of poetry that evokes a “sSoftening,” perhaps, as readers might initially think, a softening perception towards herself. Indeed, the epigraph she incorporates confirms this: “I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.” Quoting Sharon Olds, James evokes a certain gratitude, an appreciation for life and existence as it happens. And it is this gratitude, as we later discover, that we should bring to and associate with our bodies. It is also this gratitude that, like sinews and tendons, threads and unites James’ body of poetry.

For James, the body is uncontainable, beautiful, and blooming — it is something we ought to love and cherish. In “Having No Grief to Speak of,” the body is “a new source of life,” which the speaker “nurtured from every neglect” — the image revitalizes and animates the body as not just an “unthinkable animal bit” but the cosmic architect of almost biblical creation, as if its potential and power are endless. In “Ceremony,” the poem opens with a nagging question: “How do I love this body?/ Cradle it in gauze, like a third-/degree burn?” By the end of the poem, however, James inverts this sense of permanent, scorching injury as her speaker fiercely proclaims: “Damn it. Love myself / enough to lose — loosen what hangs / around my masterpiece… It is your time.” This dynamic assertion of thick-skinned self-love enables us to perceive our bodies as love-handle-ridden “masterpiece[s]” — the word itself relating the imperfect body to art of the loftiest form. In “Constraint,” James specifically depicts “writers’ bodies” — she loves “the heavy slopes/of their fronts… and their hips — / pushing past possibility and precedent.” Inherent in this is a depiction of bodies as radical, explosive. James places bodies on an almost transcendent pedestal. Indeed, “My body’s beauty, / just another wonky outline, in a chorus” — as if the wonkiness, the various imperfections of our bodies, still sing in a symphony of voices, in divine harmony.

Yet, James also cautions that we should not be defined by our bodies. In “Proverb,” in which she depicts a conversation with her mother about gastric bypass surgery, she writes: “What if the body / is just the throwaway, / the spotted frailty / that barely drapes.” James asks hard-hitting questions, asking us to reflect upon our bodies as excess, as perishable, as decorative and barely additive. As it turns out, our flesh is not immune to waste and age — indirectly, it is as if James is claiming that, to hinge ourselves upon our bodies is to hinge ourselves upon such mortal vessels, whose beauty is finite. In “Prologue to a Name,” James amplifies the ephemerality of our bodies and their beauty — after all, “The body is an unmarked grave.” It is anonymous, nondescript, ultimately destined for decay — hence, while James emboldens us to celebrate the beauty of our bodies, such celebration must be accompanied by the awareness that bodies and beauties fade.

James’ poetry collection also demonstrates the external forces that mold and warp our bodily self-perceptions. In “Autobiography of Thud,” our speaker alludes to societal beauty standards, how Clarissa (the speaker’s friend) is perceived as more “likable” because she is “less round and brown, / but that doesn’t make her more or less beautiful.” Our speaker also alludes to the complicity of men who “have things to say about your figure” and women in the shape of “square-cut glass” who “remind you how you are American, / which you learn is slur for fat” and “teach you / Fatty-fatty boom-boom is the sound you make / when you walk, when you smile or enter / a room.” There’s a devastating honesty to James’ words, particularly when she depicts her fraught dynamic with her mother, who also contributes to James’ growing angst about her body — how “My mother loves my fat / to be covered, specifically / the affected areas: / arms, belly, back and thighs” and how she tells James that “no man will ever love me / at this weight.” James offers a sobering look at the multitudes of forces that pervert and distort. Such can even originate in the intimate confines of our home, from those who are closest to us.

Perhaps it is fitting that James’ Song of My Softening ends with a poem about kindness — “Kindness changes the light here, dusts off the old innocence.” She proceeds to remark upon how we remember the compliments we receive, the external validation we seek, because we are “always yearning to feel that way again.” Although this fragment deals specifically with the kindness we receive from others, considering the deeply introspective nature of James’ poetry, I cannot help but wonder whether our poet is indirectly positing a kindness to ourselves. In the face of disfiguring forces, in the face of our dysmorphia and disappointment, it is ever more important to be generous and gentle to our hearts and bodies, so that we can allow ourselves to “bloom.” In the end, James’ collection achieves a blossoming, proffering a heartfelt love song to the fallible body.