“Radiant Wound is intensely and persuasively preoccupied with this issue of what poetry can and cannot say about human-inflicted horrors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, an “I-voice” is rare in the poems and people speak only rarely. When they do, Waterfall is careful not to put words into her subjects’ mouths, for example mediating this distance through ekphrasis on Ivorian citizens’ own art. In “Red Canvas”, Waterfall includes a direct quotation from the artist Yubah Sanogo to preface the poem: “I was painting and blood spattered onto my canvas. A bullet had grazed a woman who was running with her child. I left the wound to say ‘never again’”. The first-person poem which follows is clearly inspired by Sanogo’s words, but does not attempt to speak for him. It is a panoptic artistic vision which sees the sky, carrion beetles underfoot, a rooster on a roof and men running with dead bodies. It is a visionary voice which “cannot unsee”. Similarly, the poem “Sissi Barra: The Way of Smoke” is based on a series by acclaimed photographer Joana Choumali, who captured the charcoal-gatherers’ work. Waterfall’s poem adopts its I-voice only through the lens of Choumali’s intimate photographs: “I was born in the Bardot dust. I played in sawdust squalls, and on scabbed logs crisscrossing / the sewage […] My half-winged daughter, I invoke / the smoke to accompany you”.

Radiant Wound is an uncommon reading experience: many of its poems devastate even as they delight through verse which is sonorous and richly symbolic. There were points where I had to stop reading and bury my face in my hands, and points where I was compelled to recite aloud to relish the bewitching internal rhymes and assonance of verse which “monsters forth its orphan chant”.

~ Emily Osborne, New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry