Felicia Zamora’s “A Quadriptich: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility”

by Laura T. Smith

Felicia Zamora’s “A Quadriptich: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility,” was published in the Winter 2022 issue of The Georgia Review. It’s a sequence of expansive, connected sonnets that explores the animal-human binary and its role in producing dehumanizing rhetorics of antiblackness. The four sonnets fuse family stories with whale anatomy and critical theory in lines that range well beyond twenty syllables.

The sequence won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin who calls the poem an “un-crown, crown attack, crownology.”

The sonnet series opens with anatomical details—“the humpback whale’s mouth expands up to 10 feet, yet the throat widens only 15 inches in diameter”—and stays close to the body (“my whale heart, my whale brain”) while it tells a family story: “Grandma sent me to deliver / leftover church lilies. Would you teach me to play? I asked Evelyn Green. Oh, / dear don’t touch. Children like you become ditch diggers.”

As the poem navigates its multiple worlds—land and water, human and animal, story and theory, family and history—the speaker observes that “A body living half in air and half in water will always be misinterpreted, misrepresented.”

The poem details the whale’s ears, “the only mammalian ears to adapt fully underwater” and concludes “To examine a whale out of water means to ignore plurality in the mechanisms of anatomy.”

Moving deftly across and within the human-animal binary, the poem begins to excavate how the very “concepts of human & animality” that lie at the foundation of humanism rest on racist structures.

Drawing from Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s On Becoming Human, the poem reaches past the terms of western thinking for its own terms: “Imagine us, inscribing new / divinations of being.” 

Invoking the imaginary number in mathematics, Zamora writes, “I make my I an i… I make my i an eye..” The poem’s closing blazon brings us back to anatomical catalog as “i a force of matter, extends a reckoning.” The poem ends in a furious remaking that, as Martin describes, un-crowns the crown while building from it.
 
The expansive reach of Zamora’s sonnets feels reminiscent of sonnets by Lo Kwa Mei-en (p. 126), Lyn Hejinian (p. 74), and Diane Seuss (p. 94) that stretch across wide historical distances and amass archives in their long lines.    

Zamora has published two additional “Sonnets to Break to Crown of Invisibility” in The Missouri Review.

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Note: unless otherwise indicated, page numbers on this site refer to The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays.