Loretta Collins Klobah’s The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman, a book review by Faizah Tabasamu (Rochelle Ward) On a pedestal, in the eye of this hurricane of multilingual poetry—“a vibrant blend of English, Spanish, and Patois”--written by Loretta Collins Klobah, womanhood sheds her skin of “concrete and steel.” Sometimes this skin is personal or societal loss, the loss of a lover or husband who left, or the loss of a young child, whose dead body was burrowed through by a motherless bullet. In the poem, “El Velorio, The Wake (1893),” it is a harkening to the Puerto Rican national painting of the same name that had prophesied the “halo of flies” above the sleeping child. Also embedded in this skin, is a fisherman, brutalized by a police officer, who wrestled him to the ground like a fish baited and bleeding from the mouth.
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