Joseph Ross Reviews “let the dead in”

Saida Agostina’s collection, let the dead in, reminds me. It reminds me to remember the richness of living, the beauty of love in places we don’t expect. This beautiful collection of poems is a tap on the shoulder, followed by this advice: “Look everywhere for beauty.”

let the dead in begins with beauty before you open its pages. The cover, a painting by Stephen Towns, a Baltimore painter and fabric artist, provides a visual feast for this gathering of poems. Towns’ painting, titled “All Is Vanity,” shows us a Black woman standing in what might be a cane field, beneath a canopy of cards, bearing images of people. The woman, halo-clad, indicating her own holiness, stares directly at the viewer/reader. This is just what Agostini’s poems will do in the pages to come. She stares right at us, asking, daring, insisting that we see people and places: Black women, people who have suffered erasure, her mother, her granny, her great granny, Guyana, people whose bodies and loves are often ignored or despised. The book unfolds into three sections, which the people at Alan Squire Press, including co-founder Rose Solari, have formatted beautifully, with space and simplicity.