By Jessica Colleen McDermott
Hokis’ first poetry collection, On Unbecoming: Aesthetic Evolution of this Rising Ancestor, blends memoir and poetry to produce a narrative that feels at once both familiar and unique. It is a text that, as the content note mentions, asks its readers to confront the theme of self-forgiveness in relation to inherited and experienced complex trauma.
The book starts with a poignant prologue where Hokis meets her Armenian birth mother for the first time and hears stories of how her ancestors leapt from Mount Ararat to save themselves from “earthly suffering.” From this point onward, we realize the speaker herself is learning to confront both a heritage of suffering and their own personal grief.
In her prose as well as in her poetic line, Hokis has a knack for raw, grounded language. In the prologue, she describes meeting her mother in the following lines, “On the evening of that breathtaking day I stood in her bedroom. We spoke through our reflection in the mirror in front of us…She spoke brilliantly of Yerevan, of roasted lamb, and the importance of skilled tailors – all the while disrobing in front of me…”
Leaving the sacred meeting room of the prologue, readers dive into a world of trauma and poetry, a trauma both from being alive and a trauma experienced from being a woman.
In one of the early poems titled “Brown Room in the White House,” a snapshot is formed of a young woman who is used to fulfill the sexual fantasies of a neighbor boy. The poem includes not only this experience of abuse but also the political happenings of the time with reference to Nixon and eventually the #MeToo stories of present day. Part III of the poem reads,
1974
Nixon is the decade’s distraction.
The abstraction of the world’s ailing, dosed down to
The TVsppon we can swallow and still keep down.
Gets us just angry enough, but not angry enough.
It happens in that little box we can turn off.
In that other neighborhood.
In that out other house.
In that other person.
Expertly intertwined in this poem, as well as others in the collection, is the veiled inner world of survived sexual abuse and harassment and a reality that seeks to make such abuses normalized in complacency or shrouded in darkness. And in this book, Hokis is calling on all of us to confront these realities and rise against them.
Although the subject matter of the book remains resolute in its seriousness, Hokis still manages a playfulness both in language and tone. This playfulness reflects the inner-child present in the poems who yearns to locate and trust their true self and see beyond their grief. Simultaneously, this language displays the ridiculousness present in a society that often refuses to believe women and other victims of abuse.
One such example of playfulness is in “plated projection” when she says,
I hate us
like I hate the blissful ignorance of
bees and lions
who could flatten us
if they would
wake the fuck up and show their superpower;
a long vacation for the buzzing,
a coordinated feeding for the
palm-lengthened teeth
of the purring beast.
And still, in the same poem, the playful language develops into a larger meaning:
I hate myself
Like I hate the inability to alter the direction the world spins.
…the unchangeable direction of all things.
Again in “Preference Over Judgement,” the complexity of life and love are laid bare with a playful sincerity when Hokis writes,
…I hear someone in every song, love
Addicted to love, love
Addicted to the novelty of falling into love, love
…I will carry you if you sting my predators,
crab and anemone kind of love
I trust you to not eat me if I clean your teeth,
eel and shrimp kind of love
You will travel far on my back if you eat my ticks,
parallel path, buffalo and bird kind of love…
And in the final lines,
…Grieving love
Pain sparked growth self-love, love
Falling into love, love
Rising into love, love
It’s all rising because of love,
Love.
In these whimsy, yet calculated poems, Hokis rises above grief and trauma and comes out with a mythology all her own. To read her words is to begin to define the undefinables of life, and, in her own singular voice, her book does just this.
On Unbecoming: Aesthetic Evolution of this Rising Ancestor can be purchased on Amazon or at hokis.blog.