CAConrad. Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. Wave Books, 2024. 105 pages.
Unlike in their previous poetry collection, AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, where CAConrad communes with extinct animals through (Soma)tic Rituals, the poems in their newest collection, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, spring out of ritualistic conversation with living animals, “who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene.” Whether they’re trading gifts with Seattle crows or rubbing the back of their ears as they hear the howl of a coyote in the Mojave, Conrad dedicates their body to the beings that surround them — these poems and their wisdom emerge from that dedication.
The abundance of life sprawling out of these pages reminds us how powerful it can be to let go of our own poetic intentions. These seventy-two poems are “breathing wild creatures” that have their own agency and demand our attention, patience, and understanding. They unfold in lowercase letters without any punctuation and are heavily enjambed — free from the familiar “grime of / the sentence.” If we go too fast, if we look away, if we don’t “retire the invisible / arm reaching in and / out of our attention,” we might miss their golden returns. Reading this book felt like a training in mindfulness, a generous reorientation into the present, where we’re invited to hear the implied punctuation and to dance along with the organic bodies that emerge from the bottom of the pages.
Within this dance, I was grateful to be jolted awake by the clairvoyant voices transmitted by Conrad’s rituals. Coming to this collection preconditioned by western society to be careful, logical, and pessimistic, I was thrilled to plunge head-first into my intuition, into the depths of my true self:
we do not
trust ourselves
your imagination is
asking for parole
what is your
verdict Warden
try to always
remember the
calendar made
of light our
ancestors
followed to
pass the year
To be open to ourselves is to honor our ancestors. Their intuition, honed by their communion with nature, gave us life. We are the wardens not only of our chain-ganged imagination, but of our ancestors and their imagination. To trust oneself is to “remember the / calendar made / of light,” to observe and respect the universe that sustains us, and to become an active participant in the ongoing process of creation.
Conrad invites us into “the world / as it is / not as / it was” — our true nature without any room or time for judgment to stifle our vitality: “we felt awful after / hitting the deer / we made love / and slept with / one of his / antlers / between / us.” I was often cut open by the speaker’s unflinching honesty — the antler being a tool of reunification of the dead with the living, of the emotional with the physical, of the past with the present. After reading these lines, I felt blanketed by the speaker’s love, a love grown from the open acknowledgment of suffering, a redemptive and unabashedly erotic love.
Conrad doesn’t shy away from the erotic but channels this energy as a means of healing and reintegrating with our animal/natural self:
after sex with
this Nirvana fan
both hands on
his cock
I catch a
glimpse of
mom’s urn
wink thank
you for my
wild queer life
Again Conrad blurs the line between life and death through the erotic. Grounded in the present, the speaker revels in their sexuality by appreciating the ancestral fact that gave rise to their queerness. The speaker’s mother, now ashes in an urn, isn’t just a witness, but is a participant in the being and becoming of her child. This inspires me to “wink” more at my own ancestors even if they would have vehemently disapproved of my sexuality, spirituality, etc. It is empowering to think that they successfully passed on their genes, culture, and wisdom not so that I could replicate them, but so that I can be myself and build on what I inherited.
Conrad’s courageous, revolutionary imagination: “my / period / blood / dream / last night / was purple / smear it on / police station door…” operates beyond the perceived limits of lyrical poetry. The enjambment here allows for multiple ways of reading these lines: is this a dream about “period / blood,” or a “blood dream” the speaker has while on their period? Since Conrad jettisons punctuation, we’re invited to read these lines in ways that don’t adhere to the implied structure of the sentence: “my / period / blood / dream[:] / last night / was purple[.] / smear it on[,] / police station door[.]” These possibilities and skillful surrealist turns aren’t just a pleasure to follow as a reader but challenge the status quo that doesn’t want the imagination working. As Conrad asks, “what would it take to / kill the imagination / it is important to / wonder what / our enemies / are already / thinking.”
With every poetic turn, they give us permission to “forget [the] / heterosexual violence for one day” so that we can hear them “describe beautiful flesh [we] cannot see.” This is the job of the poet, to bring us fully back to life, to point out the magic in front of us that we have been conditioned to ignore.
Throughout the collection, Conrad elaborates on this conditioning, specifically the normalization of violence in our culture:
reporter’s recycled
weather map shows
advancing soldiers
rising temperature next to
civilian death toll
we open our bags
find cannonballs
did we shoot these
did we forget the
death we caused
…
when did we
begin to see
breathing
bodies as
targets
The (Soma)tic Ritual is not simply a hedonistic inquest into the body but is a way of unifying the corporeal, spiritual, psychological, and political. How do we live in a country that spends 877 billion dollars on military defense but only 10 billion on environmental protection? What does it mean to be a citizen of an empire that is ever-expanding and plundering the sacred earth from which it emerged?
Conrad doesn’t give simple answers but instead shows us ways of being: of looking, hearing, living, and loving that may help us get out of this era of wars, pandemics, and environmental catastrophes. We must learn to trust in our practices, in our poetry, and in ourselves: “we are the fractal / drop to hear / our own / harmonics / in the muffled / underground/ hum of seeds.”
Latif Askia Ba is a choreic poet from Brooklyn, New York. He was the Print Poetry Editor for the Columbia Journal’s sixty-first issue and is the author of The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, and many other publications. His newest collection, The Choreic Period, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in January, 2025.