‘Mandible Wishbone Solvent’ Review: A Grueling Yet Gratifying Must-Read

Asiya Wadud’s poetry collection “Mandible Wishbone Solvent” is a wonderfully confusing yet revolutionary read, despite its mere 88 pages. As this marks her fifth poetry collection, Wadud is no stranger to the poetry scene. Her work also expands on the current genre, as she tends to incorporate mixed media: Wadud has previously combined song lyrics and prayers with her poetry to craft moving and innovative collections. However, in “Mandible Wishbone Solvent,” Wadud also incorporates visual art as a supplement to her poetry — readers are confronted with vague, titleless images of what appear to be crumpled paper or a hand. Nonetheless, Wadud’s invocation of the “isthmus condition” resolves this confusion she sets up and, in doing so, shows readers the importance of appreciating the journey that the text takes them on.

Wadud creatively combines visual art, poetry, and prose while always granting each element its own space to shine. The poetry collection begins with a colorful image, followed by groupings of words strung loosely together and visually flung about the page. The poetry mostly lacks punctuation, reading as one ongoing clause and making it difficult to separate phrases from each other. While sometimes frustrating to read, the poetry is beautifully supplemented by Wadud’s prose in a style that she calls the “isthmus condition.” This condition is described by Inger Christensen as “a condition of ongoing want.” In the author’s own words, she describes this style as acknowledging that “sometimes the transit is the defining character of the events on the other side.”

Throughout the poetry collection, this concept is manipulated to be both the subject of the work and the creator of it; readers yearning to understand the intentionally vague poetry are eventually given the tools to do so, only to realize the process of getting there, to learn of the “isthmus condition,” was part of the experience as well. Wadud creates an almost overwhelming sense of completion by weaving together each of the intricate parts of the poetry collection in a way that feels more satisfying than the typical beginning-middle-end plot structure.

Through her poetry, Wadud sets readers up for a much deeper understanding of the “isthmus condition.” The first three sections progress from what reads like a stream of consciousness to complete sentences, exploding into full-blown prose in the fourth section. Wadud provides all of the necessary ingredients for understanding the “isthmus condition” by creating it within the poetry collection: The two parts to be bridged, the words on the paper and their meaning, were connected by the interaction between Wadud and readers. Wadud’s “Mandible Wishbone Solvent,” uses the common four-part structure to instead add layers and nuance to the words, phrases, and sentences composing the poetry collection, leading to a satisfying yet thought-provoking ending.

Wadud invokes the natural world to frame current events as non-political threats to humanity. For starters, the title itself has a very scientific, anatomical feel: “Mandible” and “Wishbone” refer to bones, and “Solvent” refers to the substance which dissolves another, like how water dissolves salt. By bringing nature to the forefront of readers’ minds, Wadud opens up the space for the audience to consider conflicts on both large and small scales. The parallel drawn between landforms and human conflict simultaneously dwarfs and amplifies the issues plaguing humanity by providing this analogy, thus highlighting the abstraction that politics and media outlets bring to issues of humanity. Through this parallel, Wadud exemplifies the importance of employing abstract thought processes necessary for considering current geopolitical events in lower-stakes settings, like the natural landscape. Moreover, combining poetry, prose, and visual art epitomizes the multifaceted experiences that contribute to the hardships experienced by individuals and humanity.

Much like the “isthmus condition,” the poetry collection feels whole thanks to the relationship formed between the pieces rather than the pieces themselves. This fifth collection of poems revolutionizes the idea of literary progression and critiques modernity’s impact on society’s appreciation of art.