In Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems, we are asked to imagine the tender and harsh realities of this world within a single breath. Coated in an armor of wit and humor and steeped in the idiosyncrasies of language, English as a Second Language pits sentimentality against cynicism and the personal against the national. What remains is the kaleidoscopic image of the modern American condition.
In his fourth book of poetry, Bolina continues to walk “a thread of language like a tightrope across time and space,” as Evie Shockley has remarked. Always delivered with an edge of irony and incomparable wordcraft, Bolina’s lyrics are by turns vividly imagistic (“starlings made an ecstatic / calligraphy against the gloam”), acoustically playful (“the umber end / of summer”), and infused with an acute scrutiny of historical and current events as the specter of American politics haunts the book.
These poems are tightly packed, a whimsical fabric interwoven with snippets of soundbites and telling phrases gathered by a highly alert ear. I don’t mean at all that this is found poetry, but that Bolina’s poems are precisely attuned to the stupidness, bigotry, and willful ignorance encoded into American English. There’s always this “second language” beneath the one we hear — it’s what people aren’t saying, or aren’t quite saying but, of course, they’re actually saying it.
“I’m trying to say something that feels like hearing / your voice for the first time,” writes Bolina in this elegiac collection. “It isn’t working,” he declares, though the effort allows for strange and delightful observations about fatherhood, Chicago’s dive bars, and the persistence of joy”… Bolina has gathered the mundane moments that make up a life and turned them into sparkling gems.