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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
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Book Review: Aroma Truce
by Terrell Jamal Terry

Aroma Truce
Terrell Jamal Terry
Black Lawrence Press
2017
978-1-62557-964-5
72 pages
$16


Terrell Jamal Terry resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is the author of the poetry collections Aroma Truce (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and Eyeless Light Seeing (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming, 2019). In 2018, a limited-edition chapbook will be published by The Song Cave. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, West Branch, The Journal, Green Mountains Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, Crab Orchard Review, The Volta, Sugar House Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Diode, Washington Square Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, Jet Fuel Review, Puerto del Sol, the anthology Bettering American Poetry 2015, and elsewhere.


Review





















A Review of Terrell Jamal Terry's Aroma Truce by Miguel Soto

Terrell Jamal Terry’s Aroma Truce offers an “apocryphal air,” pairing empirical images to instinctive feelings that originate from the body and mind, portraying a vivid representation of truth. In “Or, Trellis,” Terry implies the importance of relating past to present:
I know the need for leaping
through decades, a dash
of bucolic life & the generous
ventriloquist moon.
​The speaker of the poem blurs the dialectic between reality and escapism, demonstrating the mind’s ability to create images in other worlds, yet producing a sharp impression on the senses as if the speaker really is in a “6th century northern hemisphere.” The image of a weakened framework illustrates dependency between two characters: “threadbare attic calamity: / Theotokos (or ever after) / leaning into cities,” leading into, “will you marry a hermit / with his mitkam music, / his true happiness away from?” Dependency between two characters draws on the abstract conclusion that Terry’s speaker leads the reader into:
it is something to be clear
after investigation.
What is the essence of your movement,
& the essence of the text?
​Terry’s speaker suggests the interdependency between image—connoting reality, experience—past and present, and the innate, invisible feelings that pass through the body, which all add up to summarize a distinctive, acceptable truth. 
 
In Terry’s “Meadow Dead Center,” the speaker opens with ambiguities, paving the internal debate between self and other, paralleling the vagueness of one’s feelings with one’s self. “I was thinking I should / collapse the thought when I searched / for an actual thing to pick up,” ponders the speaker; replying back with, “it did not exist.” Terry’s speaker’s unidentified thoughts and feelings reveal an introspective process that a reader may imagine as universal. In an instructive manner, the first stanza concludes, “fractions of ourselves are not necessarily facades,” indicating the many personas a body inhabits, and then exhibits, but with the wary consciousness that not all of the presentations of one’s self is the chief persona. The speaker’s overwhelming conclusion leads to juxtaposition in the sensory input of images:
multiple circular notes & a dream
we know that no one owns
sends rainbow balm to ears
instead of eyes.
The paradox produces a personal question made public: “is it an arduous secret / that we don’t want it to leave,” making Terry’s speaker profound, in the sense that the speaker can speak for themselves, and universal emotions. Terry’s speaker gradually abandons “I” statements from the first stanza, utilizing “we” to reach a wider audience, and ultimately forcing the reader to practice the same introspection: “you’d never think / to go there, desiring to be alone, not lonely.”
 
Essentially, Terrell Jamal Terry becomes a confessional voice for the ambiguous tracings that flow in the very essence of humanity. Terry imagines speakers with extremely personal conflicts, and through the deliberate, poetic musings that Terry practices, Terry manages to connect with a wider audience, forcing readers to meditate on his words, and pull themselves out from within. Aroma Truce is a confluence of personal and public, inward feelings and outward appearances, denotation and connotation. Ultimately, an agreement between the senses—seen and unseen. Aroma Truce is for the reader looking to pin image to feeling and emotion; for the reader looking for an absorbing, inward journey—a universal understanding of unexplainable, half-answered, yet acceptable truths. 



Picture
Miguel is the Asst. Managing Editor and Book Review Editor for Jet Fuel Review. As an editor, one of his main concerns is giving a space to marginalized voices, centralizing on narratives often ignored. He loves reading radical, unapologetic writers, who explore the emotional and intellectual stresses within political identities and systemic realities. His own writings can be found in OUT / CAST: A Journal of Queer Midwestern Writing and Art, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Rogue Agent. He writes for the Jet Fuel Review blog in Not Your Binary: A QTPOC Reading Column.


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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022