“Poetry,” writes Audre Lorde (1984), “is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives” (38). Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts, Nikky Finney's fifth collection of poetry and her first in nearly a decade, echoes and amplifies Lorde's theorizing that poetry is not a luxury. “Occasional poems”—or poems composed to commemorate an event—festoon the volume, interweaving the varied occurrences that shape Finney's world. Finney explains that she “was raised by people who used their hands every day to make things happen in the world” (xiii); her occasional poems both respond to and craft the happenings of her world. Similar to Audre Lorde's insistence on poetry's necessity because of the way it enabled her to dream about life and enact the future of her world (1984), Finney's occasional poems assert the embodied, imaginative, and performative power of poetry—the political, aesthetic,...
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