Anastacia Tolbert is a freelance poet, writer and performer. Photo courtesy of wordpress.com

4 out of 5 stars

When I first picked up “26” by Anastacia Tolbert, I flipped the chapbook open to the letter “V.” “26” stands for the 26 letters in the English alphabet and Tolbert has written a poem for each letter. Letter “V” is a poem that repeats one word 91 times and that word is: vagina.

With motifs such as feminism and female sexuality throughout the chapbook, it makes sense that this poem would be in this chapbook. But because I have the maturity of six year old, the poem “V” made me laugh out loud and led me to want to read more of this chapbook.

This may not be the best first impression because of my laughable immaturity, but along with the reading of letter “V,” the cover is enough to draw people in. It has a modern feel — simple with soft, neutral colors on the cover. The cover is mostly white with a pleasing texture. Her name is soft pink, the number two is a soft blue and six in a soft orange. It’s simple yet very appealing.

In the letter “V” poem, there was something strange that was initially off putting. Random letters seemed to be bolded in the poem that didn’t make sense to me at first. I thought it may have been the publisher’s mistake but upon closer inspection, I was wrong. For the letters bolded were V, A, G, I, N and A making a 92nd vagina in the poem — an interesting visual element of her poem.

Poems “S,” “Y” and “Z” had something that was lacking, but that lack — like the use of white space in a painting — made these poems. For example, in the poem “S,” Tolbert writes, “first, paint your/ lips artery red, second pucker them in the shape of _________” this blank is intentional — it makes the reader fill in the blank with whatever shape seems the sexiest, which is what poem “S” is all about. “Y” and “Z” make good use of this “white space” as well making the reader fill in the blank by participating in the poem making process, it seems.

My favorite poem is letter “N.” It starts off with “namaste. in everything. but-” and she goes on to list all sorts of horrible people such as Nazis and pedophiles and even things like people who happen to like having sex in their cars during traffic.

She questions the readers hatred and exclusion of people in this poem, pointing out the reader’s hatred. Especially with the last line, “nope. not them.” meaning that we as the readers want peace (“namaste”) except to those we don’t approve of.

A couple of small critiques I have about this chapbook is the line in poem “F”: “your life/ is the script with the happy ending.” as well as this line in the poem “K,” “kissed a girl & you liked it/ before katy perry.” I felt that these were a bit cliche in comparison to the rest of her work.

With poems as wonderful and a thought provoking as poem “N,” I feel that these lines in these poems could have been worked on or changed to make it an even stronger body of work.

Tolbert has an interesting concept with beautiful poems that delve into the abstract, into the artistic and into topics like race, homosexuality, feminism and family that make “26” a good read for anyone who likes poetry that’s a little different than the norm.

Kailyn Dahle is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. She can be reached at [email protected]