Angel T. Dionne’s Bird Ornaments is a poetry collection that spools out all the elements of surrealism for its readers to savour. Using the human gene as their specimen, the poems’ speakers create a tension for the readers by pessimistically evaluating their own genes and those of their lineage. This is displayed in “Inherited Maladies,” in which the body is a dimensional graph of genetic variations:

a head birthing dementia,
manic calamities symmetrical across time,
errant fingers knitting rheumatoid arthritis,
shingled forearms scaled by distress.

We all run perpendicular to each other.

There are instances in the collection when breathing becomes a chore. The reader is taken aback by how sticky the poems are, by the cloying effect of the images sewn into the poems. In “Broken Silk,” for example, Dionne writes:

Which way did my neck bend
before it broke?
Did it grow crooked
with the weight of my silk?
Did it spin hot and gurgling
down my spine?

I suck plump aphids
from the audience’s crescendo.
In the open space, I evaporate,
hanging there like a mosaic.

Both previously quoted poems display features of surrealism in their bizarre assemblages of ordinary objects and personal motif, consequently producing a metaphysical atmosphere. “Inherited Malady,” for example, is like a sharp blitzkrieg of physiological criticism that commonises the body by placing it side by side with illnesses capable to killing it: “a head birthing dementia/errant fingers knitting rheumatoid arthritis/shingled forearms scaled by distress.”

Surrealism was invented as a reaction to World War I. The artists and poets of the day had suffered great loss and, in expressing their grief, surrealism was born. Bird Ornaments as a book feels like an heirloom passed down from surrealist ancestors, in which imageries combine to present each poem as a petite Big Bang, a gauntlet of acrimony. It burns so fiercely that it halts its readers’ cogitation and forces them into the speaker’s personal iconography.

In “Grandmother’s Geranium,” for instance, Dionne paints a picture of her grandmother’s rocking chair. Seeing that a rocking chair usually has sentiments attached to it, especially in families where there are kids available to listen to old granny’s stories, the rocking chair is almost like a church’s pulpit. For her part, Dionne sees it almost as a garden:

My grandmother’s rocking chair
breeds anguished blooms.
My hopeless geraniums, she calls them.

They blossom elsewhere, too,
in whispered secrets,
in an egg cracked too soon,
on the surface
of my grandfather’s gout toe.

She often picks them
and places them in the kitchen—
forming a trail of dirt from chair to table,
a path of discarded treasures,
and earthworms
wriggling
on ugly linoleum.

This poem does all it can to make you feel the pulse of being forced into the chair, as you descend together into a different-than-usual form—chairs becomes geraniums that blossom in whispered secret. But also they are eggs cracked too soon.

Dionne explores few poetic forms in this collection. Rather, she distills a sort of platonic model of absurdism. You get a very clear sense of the poems as memoir, yet one stripped of its component parts: no protagonist, no antagonist, nor a God, nor an author of our genome; just a baleful thrum. You feel like you are inside the poem, contracted to ant size, running along the lines of the poem as the poetic devices come down on you. The poems sound like a sickly beast, breathing each line, betraying its human connection even when the eerie rhythms start to feel metaphysical. This is Dionne’s first full-length poetry collection, but she handles it like a once-in-a-lifetime member of the avant-garde, one who has always been writing surrealism for people steeped in trauma and other kinds of grief.

If it can sometimes feel like a runaway train, in a way Bird Ornaments also puts you in control of the steering, shattering the civil distance between speaker and reader that usually manifests in a poem’s sense of space. Dionne discards that convention here. Instead, in Bird Ornaments you look yourself in the mirror, wondering what about your own gene, your own lineage, you should choose to write about, how bizarre it will sound. Dionne uses automatism not as an embellishment but to bring out qualities within the subject of the poem itself, namely her psychological/physiological experience. For all the surrealist imagery, there are times when these poems feel hyperreal, almost like a spiritual preset.

It is shown in “A Lesson in Morality,” when Dionne writes:

Parakeet your silly little worries.
Table your speech,
it’s useless, at any rate.

Lobotomize your loins
and calligraph
your simple fetishes.
The dusty top shelf
welcomes them.

Candle your intrusive thoughts
in search of parasites.
Frame your wanton ideas.
Wheel your rubber arguments
down the street
like a child’s bicycle.

Tourniquet your tongue—
a ghostly limb
that tastes only
the bitter sky.

Dionne displays little dynamic range in the architectural design of this poem as she patiently, sarcastically mocks seeming harbingers of moral truths. This is what happens when surrealism meets sarcasm and is shaken together to make poetry. If I were to draw a diagram of Bird Ornaments, it would look like a vertical and horizontal streak of black ink, a skeletal dagger.

In one of the more impactful poems, “Ten Surrealist Short Stories,” Dionne goes big on symbolism and not merely for the sake of it—the method serves as an emotional conveyor to the reader. The first four lines go: “My tree-trunk limbs/send their regards./Insincere./But who am I to judge?” This is a visual pun, playing with email templates in signaling a suffering limb. The speaker gives the sense that her limbs are stiff and swollen; but the insincere regard is signifying something malicious which she is not ready to bring under her moral microscope.

In the second stanza, the speaker says: “A hurriedly triaged kidney/swells shut against the world./It will die next Tuesday./Funeral is on Friday./In lieu of flowers,/bring donations.” She elevates the kidney to an independent being that dies, has funerals and donations. But one question: In this fantasy world where kidneys conduct their own burial, are other attendants fellow kidneys? Are there full-bodied humans among the mourners, and will other parts of them exist independently and attend? Who dies here, the kidney or the speaker?

Surrealism comes with juxtaposition of opposite objects to create at times delicious imageries, but at others disturbing ones that send the reader into a frenzy, their head bursting with unanswered questions and impossible juxtapositions. The tenth story and last stanza of the poem ends in this haunting fashion: “Frank tried to sever the link between his desire/and stigma,/but his stomach/had other plans./We don’t know what happened to him/after he left the buffet line.” At this point, one can only pray that Frank is not suffering any fate in close resemblance to Job’s.

It is stern, it is beautiful, it is formidable, this collection. Its loaded seventy-five-poem horror package endears itself even to readers who might not have been familiar with surrealism. Fans of André Breton and Salvador Dalí will gift their children or loved ones, who will hold it as a keepsake and probably read the poems to their friends in solemn, sobering, tear-inducing tones. For the Sylvia Plath lovers who look for her confessionalism and rawness in alternate, more bizarre form, here it is. And for those of us who love the visual, the absurd, the bizarre, here’s a book to read to our bones when they start collapsing.