urban disorders by Natasha N. Deonarain

Natasha Deonarain paints a vivid post-pandemic landscape that takes the reader on a journey of love, loss and fragility. While peeling back disturbing layers of our dystopian lives, she nevertheless weaves a resilient spirit of courage throughout the book that fortifies hope for our future. The reader begins, submerged in the forced happiness of city life. This is a time and place where we “binge netflix— / fist-stuff slapstick down your throat”; a haunting acquiescence that leaves us willing to do “anything to feed the blood-thirsty hound.” The journey continues through the lonely desert-scape of Arizona, sweeps across the peaked mountains of Canada and into the smog-filled traffic jams of Colorado, finally bursting through tempestuous purple skies to unveil a whole-world perspective contained in our secret prayers for Mother Earth. Her last poem is not so much an end to our journey, but a wake-up call for a few beginning, an dream-like utopia that truly belongs to every one of us, should we choose to claim it—“A lover’s candied kiss under an indigo sky and stars— / Of infinite possibility.”