Kalehua Kim, Mele (Trio House Press, 2025) 100 pages, poetry, forthcoming on July 1, 2025. More info here.
Kalehua Kim explores themes of death, family dynamics, and the relationship between mother and daughter in this collection of songs as poetry. I was excited about this as an indigenous work. It seemed to have a lot of potential as a book that has many layers of possible understanding and prisms of viewpoints.
I was especially eager to learn some Hawaiian until I discovered that each time Hawaiian appears in the text, it is a repetition of an English phrase that has already occurred, making it merely decorative - a flower to signal that this is an indigenous poet - but serving no real depth of purpose in most cases. Identity as product placement?
My favourite parts of this collection are those that focus on the poet's personal memories of her mother: how she used to sing all the time, the songs they used to share, and the intimate moments by her deathbed. These moments carry the weight of depth and of real soul. This is where we feel closest to the emotional need that drives the poet to write in the first place and where the poetry feels the most original.
Favourite lines:
"I have lost all but one tale/ you told to me in childhood./ Days were longer then," - "Ka Hale, The Nurturing Place"
"You yearn for the days when your people died/ in the beds in which they were born." - "Dying Looks Like"
"we shared so/ many words/ all we didn't say/ full" - "Glottal Stop: My Mother's Last Words"
"Other mothers find me here://... they all come to me, mothers mothering me/ Mothering with a silence that is not her silence." - "Not One Parking Space"
"His silence, humid and thick as thunder,/ hangs heavier than the sun-sapped mangoes" - "Memory Sonnet"
"No cloth can keep you clean" - "Woman's Work"
"My belly ready to spill its light// ... I pushed until I broke open with light." - "Makalii and the Stars That Followed"
"the only way to look at time is to refuse to see time" - "Ha"
"The weight of fruit strengthens/ the branch eventually." - "Songs for the Life I Chose or How to Stay Together"
