Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

More poems? oh, yayy. I swear I am just not deep enough to understand what the writer is trying to say, or express in the poems. When talking about the other poems in class, everyone seems to know, or have their own idea, of what the author was talking about in that poem. What every word really means, or the pain or joy that they felt. I honestly zone out when reading poems, and have to re read the poem about 3 times to fully understand it. You have no idea how long it took me to read this whole book. Forever and a day. And honestly, I still zoned out after reading the same poems over and over again. It may have been because I worked all weekend and tried to read the book between jobs and also after work, and I just wasnt focused on it and just wanted to sleep. As always. But anyways, I did find that I could understand the main event happening within the book, and what the main idea of all the poems together were. There were a few poems that I did really enjoy in this book.
"Katrina" on page 31 is one I thought I could understand pretty well. As soon as I read it I thought of Hurricane Kartina, and the damage it did. Also in other parts of the book hurricanes are mentioned and I feel that that is was is being talked about. It says at one point "gut dragging and bulging with ball lightning, slush, broke through with branches, steel" and to me that sounds exactly like a hurricane. Waking up scared to the sound of lightning, having watery slushy mud outside, or inside, your house, branches would be flying in the air, and all over the ground, and there would also be steel around from either destroyed cars, or household items, or other things. It also says "I loudly loved the slow bones of elders, fools, and willows" and that to me means that they lost someone, or multiple people to the hurricane. Someone elder to them, such as a grandparent or even a parent. A fool to them could maybe be someone they no longer talked to or liked, but was still effected by the death of them. And willows could be the lose of the land where the hurricane happened. They could of lost their home, and everything they had to call theirs.
"Tankas" on page 38 is also about a hurricane. Just the way the poem is set up reminded me of one. The sonnets are in a zig zag kind of order, and looks like they got tossed around a little, just like a hurricane would do so. Many times through out the poem you can tell they are talking about a hurricane or storm of some sort. Some lines such as:

• "never has there been a wind like this"
• "he falls and barely splashes"
• "to drown out the waters teeth"
• "here is what drowning feels like"
• "what in the water?"
• "before the mud smells your skin and begins its swirl"

Also about this poem is that I found it very sad. They talk about having 3 children, but only 2 arms, and one falls into the water but its very light so it is a younger child. Then they talk about finder her sister in the water, and her father under rocks, I assume they're dead. Then about drowning and what its like to drown. And then at the end, crossing over. Meaning that they died? Or are they describing how someone else has died and they are just reliving it?
This whole book was pretty deep and sad in most of the poems. But I did enjoy it a lot. Some poems I found very straight forward and others were a little more difficult to understand. But I could tell, even from the cover, that it was about a hurricane or storm and losing loved ones in it.