Cleveland Review of Books

In poetry’s effort to communicate, it must always deal in the dirty commodity of the word. It trades and hedges, extracts and reproduces so that between Nerval’s myth and Arjoon’s mythic register, we find a kinship built from the shared, but uneasy and slippery, impulse to universality. There is a sense in which myth might trend toward the obscure, the abstracting, that it takes the concrete to the ephemeral sphere of cultic knowledge and aura. Of course, modernism’s impulse toward the seemingly unintelligible was a legible reaction and a wrestling with the speeding up and intricate reshufflings of life. But what myth injects in Arjoon is not the continuance of a kind of narrative which imbues culture with a deeper form of import or meaning; rather, it is that which breaks from this lineage, creating gaps between the moments when obscured reality becomes visible in reflection of that which is seemingly legible, myth itself, which Arjoon winks toward when we writes “I was marked by History. / It marked me with its irritated tongue,…” in the poem “Antlers.”
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Nicodemus Nicoludis, Bartering with Language: On Terrence Arjoon’s The Disinherited
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Terrence Arjoon | The Disinherited  | Ugly Ducking Presse | November 2025 | 88 pgs