Reviewed by Katy Gero

The magic of writing is that letters, the dead shell of the writer's words, can return to life through the power of the reader, performing their own magical process.  Niki Tulk's O grapples with the letter O as its own agent, and she presses life into the letter until it becomes its own character. O: "a primitive word at the threshold of speech;" "hole/whole;" "womb/genitals/mouth." O as daughter, as mother, as waiting in womb.

Tulk is also referencing Ophelia, Western culture's forever nothing girl, crazy with grief—her stillness (death) a kind of permanent erasure. Ophelia, through the cultural dominance of Shakespeare's work, becomes not just a girl but the girl, and Tulk is interested in challenging how girlhood is written into our cultural narratives. O, then, lives in the intertextuality that necessitates any work that deals with a letter, one of the most fundamental tools we have as writers. In O the book, Tulk is channeling literary criticism, gender studies, witness, and folklore, all of which underline her experience as a performance artist and multimodal creator.

O, then, becomes Tulk's entry into gendered violence, sexual assault in particular. She speaks of O as womb and as testicle, semen and eggs. "[M]y little o" becomes the speaker's daughter, and the speaker has only "Words like soft rabbits" to deal with their daughter's assault. This book of poems surfaces the trauma and horrors of our world, and, therefore, our language, through the minutia of a letter.

Tulk's O, as character, is working in a tradition of bringing letters to life. I think of Aracelis Girmay's sibilant s in her poem "On the Shape of the Sentence" in Kingdom Animalia. S as snake, s as she, s that bends into the e of an embryo. I think of Tessa Micaela's enigmatic o in her book-length poem where bells begin. Micaela's o wanders the city of dreams, is the lyric gesture of longing, moving towards a we. Tulk's O is a daughter, has a daughter, "waits in a womb" as mother tries to find her.

In all cases we see the letter as both character and as stand-in for something ineffable. Letter-as-character works differently than direct address, where you can take on many meanings but typically references someone, where the letter gestures more towards the multitudes.  Tulk seems interested in the multitudes of girlhood rather than the you of, say, Ophelia, or any particular instance of gendered violence.

As poets we obsess over the intimacy of language and wonder at its specificity and essence. In general, we like the small—how just a few words on the page can create as much as a wall of text. Imbuing a single letter with a whole life has always felt to me like the natural consequence of such detailed attention to the way language works, and here Tulk does it exquisitely, considering Big O and Little o and referencing her shadow as the number 0. O as "Nothing nill null nome naught."

But letters aren't the only movement in this book. Fable is equally important, and these dual tools make the book less tied to texture than object. The fable, in two parts, follows the daughter of an owl (another o) and a baker, her abuse at the hands of the townspeople, and the healing power of the ocean. The fable exists as a series of prose poems, though there's a symmetry between the fable and the poems that shifts the collection towards a project book or book-length poem, rather than a collection.

In the end, Tulk's book O has me recalling Louise Glück's assertion in her essay Against Sincerity—that poetry is an attempt not at honesty, but at truth. O gets at truth through a letter, through a fable, and finally through the readers themselves, as we splice these movements together into our own truth. The contradictions of O, and the speaker's experience of trauma, and the world of the fable, remind us that Truth, the kind that sometimes arrives by moving away from honesty, lives in these contradictions. The book ends on a moment of roaring silence, and this mimics our O from the beginning, which is presented as a list of contradiction: "an infinity of nothings is nothing, and also infinity."