Reading Aghamohammadi is like a good fuck:
​A Review of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL by Temperance Aghamohammadi 

 by Alaina Hammond





    Aghamohammadi's book is a real fingerbanger. From the outset, there is no one, proscriptive “correct” way to interpret poetry. In the case of an entire poetry book, one prefers not to digest the poems as individual works, but to read the collection as a cohesive, themed narrative. A concept album, rather than a mix tape, namely.

    Inevitably, though, despite my intention to read BATTALION SHAPED GIRL holistically, individual lines indeed stood out. Or popped out, or even skeeted out, if I may use a colloquialism. The voice that emerges is often quite amusing (“Even louder sex as revenge”), and consistently urgent.

    Sitting upright in bed, the humors hold court in the chest./How to return to God’s vessel – brow, tongue, breast. So begins the bold poem, "Afterlife". An incredibly strong rhyming couplet, the poem then morphs—slightly—into something between blank verse and free verse. This seems like the perfect metaphor for the poet's forthright talent: at ease in the liminal space, with an appetite to genre-bend.

    "Some Odyssey!" has an immediately gripping title. It then lives up to its title by channeling Homer in both content and style. Too succinct to be derivative, it’s almost a genre of its own: The brief epic.

    The poem "Matryoshka" at times veers into a dark subject matter (“yes, I know how/ to cleave/to sorrow’s/whetstone./how to be a knife.). Still, it manages to evoke a sense of levity and even fun. The imagery of dolls within dolls—the matryoshka—is playfully evocative, and hews to the larger theme of the book.

BATTALION SHAPTED GIRL gangbangs the line between poetry, and poetic prose. Which is of course already a slick line. Where does poetry end and prose begin is a question that literary scholars have been asking since even before the internet rolled around.

    Who would I recommend this book for? “Fans of poetry” is too broad a category. “Fans of Sylvia Plath” seems like a more fine-tuned endorsement.


Alaina Hammond is an artist based in California. She graduated from Columbia University in the City of New York.

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