By Denise Duhamel

Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems (Copper Canyon, 2024) is a delightful political treatise for our troubled world. This poet’s gifts are many. In a particularly brilliant move, Bolina sequences the book’s poems in two ways, with a table of contents both at the beginning and the end. You can read from the perspective of the poet’s childhood to adulthood and parenthood, or from present perspective of parenthood looking backward to childhood. The nuances displayed are tremendous. The foreshadowing works in either order. And both the beginning and ending poems (no matter which way you read) involve the speaker eating hotdogs—in London or Chicago.

Bolina’s most spectacular gift is his voice, a talent displayed in his previous books Carrier Wave (2007), Phantom Camera (2013), and The 44th of July (2019). English as a Second Language and Other Poems opines on immigration, the climate crisis, and the recent pandemic, all while making us laugh. In “Serious Art That’s Funny: Humor in Poetry,” Matthew Roher writes, “Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it.” Bolina, whose recent collection of essays Of Color took on issues of race and privilege, walks this tightrope of parody, balancing his manifesto on his noggin, never panicking or looking down. Close to the center of the book is “Waiting My Turn,” which begins:

                             Honestly, Elizabeth, I think I’d rather be the 239th 
                             Jaswinder on the moon than the 1st,

                             rather myself an nth brown anybody
                             in a hand-me-down helmet, a secondhand

                             pressure suit, my capsule certified and
                             pre-owned . . .

The poem subverts expectations and stereotypes of ambition in the context of oppression, about those who might strive to be the first fill-in-the-blank.

“Waiting My Turn” may remind readers of Nikki Giovanni’s “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” in which she compares outer space to the Middle Passage, enslaved people entering the unknown, not able to see behind to where they’ve come from, and somehow making a new life in an inhospitable place anyway. Giovanni’s stoic line “The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans” sings in sharp tonal contrast to Bolina’s “The moon?? Everyone’s been // to the goddamn moon . . . ” Both Giovanni’s and Bolina’s poems bite, but you won’t notice teeth marks from Bolina’s until a few days later.

Bolina also explores travel on earth, far from one’s original home, as he borrows the language of reality TV and making it very much his own. “House Hunters International” introduces a couple from the “burbs outside Atlanta” who explore living in De Pijp, Zagreb, Quito, and Phnom Penh, looking for “this other life they wanted to wear / like a pelt.” Their longing to be expats is tinged with privilege, of course, that is not afforded to most immigrants. The companion poem “House Hunters” offers a different take, comparing finding a house to taking down a deer—“our doting mother, / crack shot and immigrant on the hunt.”

A series of fascinating elegies pop up like wreaths in English as a Second Language and Other Poems, a constant reminder of peril and loss amidst Bolina’s irreverance. In “Actual Elegy,” “Freudian Elegy,” and “Bird, Elegy,” the speaker demonstrates sincere tenderness. But many of the elegies return to Bolina’s characteristic humor. “Elegy for a Dog” takes its shot at insensitive American boomers who insist upon the good old days “when bread cost a nickel and a paper cost a nickel // and a Buick cost a dime.” “Terrible Elegy” celebrates the death of Rush Limbaugh—“so raucous and high am I in the conga line / at the luau on the night of your fantastic passing.” “The Billy Graham Elegy” contemplates the floor, rather than the ceiling, of the Sistine Chapel which the “tourist kids” call “‘The Sixteen Chapel’ as if it were one more middling outlet / in a protracted franchise, which it is . . . ” And in “The Apartment (or The Jesus Elegy),” Bolina contemplates where Jesus lived until he was thirty-three, wondering if he “surfed the disciples’ futons or freeloaded off His Parents / deep into His reluctant Manhood . . . ”

Jaswinder Bolina displays inventiveness that goes beyond quirky, forging a deep engagement with our present world. It’s not hard to imagine a particularly vile senator reading his work, possibly chuckling along, and then only nights later waking up with a start, asking—Wait a minute, what did he mean by that?

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Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pittsburgh, 2025), Second Story (2021), and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University, in Miami.