by Melanie Maria Goodreaux

Saida Agostini’s new book, let the dead in, is a brave sacramentary of ancestral homage, pungent truths, and blunt images that the reader can keep by their bedside for regular doses of full sensual awakenings brought on by frank honesty. It hails all that is “woman.” It is a beautiful blend of grit, sensuousness, and spirituality. Beyond hailing the wins and woes of being a woman, Agostini bears light on death and the complexity of family ties. Familial love, intimacy, and pain combined in lines offer some very moving verses to the reader.

From “creation:”

2. The wedding night, 1958

You tell me about the lilies he brought you
dead from salt the hours he spent
brushing your hair how he kneeled
in front of you cupped your trembling
face in his hands as you wept

wishing you would die like the flowers

let the dead in, Agostini’s debut collection dons a painting by Stephen Towns as its cover: a sister saint, a beautiful brown woman, amidst playing cards shuffling magically in the air. The painting on the cover makes its character at once a saint and a gambler in a garden which is perfectly matched with Agostini’s work. The cover invites you into this world of Agostini’s where you find orgasms, curses, culture, grit, the revelation of family secrets, homages to ancestors and women who bore harsh inequities, violence, and philanderers. Saida Agostini does that great thing of mixing religiosity and culture, but tops it off with sexual release and historical pinnings. 

She gives us an image of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth as lesbian lovers:

 “sojourner and harriet latching on to each other’s bodies…” 

\and has the gift of presenting the grotesque with the beautiful. Agostini is generous with surprises, and embellishes her titles with great quotes, some from James Baldwin, another from a black mother who saw her young daughter shot to death. Agostini is not afraid of honesty or depth. She even has you turn the book on its side to read such hot lines as “the pastor your chest, my thighs the choir, two great fat bodies collided with the force of desire.” 

let the dead in is a generous ride of a book, but be prepared to be seated with truths like “when it is two pm in your office and you have a flashback to that moment you were raped”—yeah, that’s just a title in the book. 

Agostini looks it all squarely in the eye. Even if the subjects in her poems hide truth, or live just to its side, she offers a poet’s acuity on love’s harshness. You can see this move in “notes on archiving erasure,” which opens with a quote borrowed from James Baldwin: “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle. Love is war; love is growing up.”

when I say
I love my family 
what I mean is
I worship 
the battle. you 
can’t wish away 
creation or reorder 
blood. childishly
I thought we could retell story(ies)
I mean to say I can’t lie. 

And lie she doesn’t. Some poems seem to want to put the truth back on track by exposing a long-held hidden familial secret or exposing a lie. The work feels personal, as if the divulging of these secrets and truths are something the reader is privy to, the reader sharing these epiphanies with the writer. Agostini’s expressions offer and handle the range of these complicated themes in her debut collection giving us much to look forward to from this poet.