Our Obsidian Tongues

David Shook’s debut collection employs the city as a lens through which to explore the multiplicity of voices that inhabit it, cannibalizing a wide range of his predecessors – from the Classical Nahuatl singers of the Aztec empire to the contemporary poets of Mexico City – to scrape away the city’s grunge and reveal hidden layers of sediment and story.

Our Obsidian Tongues has a tough, abrupt, incendiary quality. Its violent palette and its restless formal play—”postcard,” prose poem, epigram, ghazal—are not gratuitous but a response to the turbulent and vivid Mexico it describes. Nature and culture on a collision course: skies filled with volcanic ash and streets ranged by ravenous mutts but also the poverty and desperation behind the drug wars. It’s to the credit of this unusual first collection that these striking features still allow for quieter humour and tenderness. —Jamie McKendrick