Please make me pretty, I don't want to die

"Please make me pretty, I don't want to die is the first book of poetry by Tawanda Mulalu. In four parts named for the seasons, these poems bring together descriptions of everyday experiences and sensory memories with an overarching focus on the pleasures and difficulties of intimacy and the anomie of United States culture. An immigrant to the U.S. from Botswana, Mulalu explores facets of his life and identity in a powerful first-person voice, including his relationships, his immigration, and his work as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The collection juxtaposes traditional poetic styles such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as craggy prose-poem 'prayers' and other meditations, to create a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image ('The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn/ distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window/ a synecdoche of country') or crystallize into lament: ('If I saw a starving/ black child my first thought would not be to take this picture of myself. Or wake. Everyone is dying. There/ are such pretty words for this.')"--