Carnaval

Poetry should lend itself to appreciation in isolation from the intertextual connections and cultural references. It should create a world that the reader can trust and get lost in. It must hold language captive and make it to its bidding. Jaji’s work demonstrates these abilities in abundance. Her poems, while clothed in English, bristle with the muscle of another tongue. There is an undercurrent of music that is more than poetry’s flexed musicality, and they possess the kind of regard that unsettles the eye and stills the heart.