Bioku’s debut collection of affirmation poetry draws a dynamic blueprint of the unsettled mind that ultimately reveals itself as a declaration of self-acceptance. Divided into seven sections that each excavate different sources of emotional, physical, philosophical and spiritual discord, We Ponder takes readers on an odyssey through the speaker’s psyche that touches on disordered eating, OCD, depression, emotional abuse, feminism, racism, and more. “A work in progress, we were promised to be completed,” Bioku writes in “Becoming More Aware,” but that promise, it turns out, is never fulfilled; despair reigns for that poem’s speaker until their perspective shifts enough for them to abandon the idea of unachievable completion.

In “Insomnia,” from a section titled “Mental Collisions,” the speaker stays up until dawn and “watch[es] as the Earth tilt[s] on its axis to reveal the sun’s glory.” At this change in perspective, day is a result of the earth turning rather than the sun coming up. The speaker then asks, “does the sun ever rise?” which is a remark not just on the unsettled self but the unsettled collective—even though humanity has long understood that the sun itself does not ascend the sky, we cannot abandon the myth of sunrise. In Bioku’s hands, though, this inquiry and this turning of perspective on its axis results in a healing liberation.

Bioku spins an elaborate web of self-expression in We Ponder that, despite several one-dimensional poems, is accessible, relatable, and refreshingly bold, particularly for readers seeking poetry about mental illness. Bioku is at her best in this collection in the section titled “Spiritual Remedies,” which is a series of prayer-poems that are brief but often transcendent. As the speaker writes in “Magenta Cosmos,” in the path of God or Creator, the unsettled mind is not one meant to be solved or settled: “grand designs have no negative spaces.”

Takeaway: Dreamy, melancholy poems of spirituality, mental health, heartbreak, and love.

Comparable Titles: Nikita Gill’s “The Truth About Your Heart,” R. H. Sin.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B
Marketing copy: B