As your average gay person, I pride myself on my ability to talk astrology at the club or at the twelve-step meeting. I was in for a rude awakening when Victoria Mbabazi sent me a manuscript that (almost) made me reconsider my position on air signs. For those of us who need a brush up, the twelfth house is a place of emotional mystery, and Mbabazi’s titular Siren is indeed the occupying Pisces. If The Siren in the Twelfth House had a slogan, it would be:  BRINGING BACK YEARNING. I mean this in the best way. Mbabazi transcends the trend of detachment for a mournful, sometimes petty, always gorgeous group of poems that read as incantations. Even the dedication slyly demonstrates a messy equilibrium:

To the Sagittarius I stopped knowing in 2018–the misery you caused me soft launched my career so I’m gonna say we even and also, thank you

Reminiscent of Dickinsonian “slant rhyme,” the poems sound like prayers of assonance. Mbabazi’s style in many ways feels like an Artmesian howl at the moon: the loudness of the work comes through the tension between godlessness and godessness. We are even privy to some unholy pairings: references to Glee’s Rachel Berry and Warsan Shire exist within the same pages. 

One of my initial points of interest in The Siren came from the idea of astrological houses as physical, constructed homes. It can be easy to lose a reader in cosmic mediations, and for a poetry collection centering the stars, Mbabazi keeps readers firmly rooted to the ground (even before we get to the EARTH element section of the book). There is a definitive invocation of negative space for me, houses burning, houses empty, Cancer speaking the line: “I can only tell you what’s missing.” 

Mbabazi grapples with ancience and apocalypse in equal measure. The poem WASH is the first of several references to an impending hurricane, and in Eleventh House Whirlwind, Mbabazi writes, “your love is an airborne virus.” Timely (timeless) and devastating, the star-signs-as-ensemble-cast orient us somewhere between myth and reality…of love, of Americanism, of climate change. One of the first things I wrote down while reading The Siren in the Twelfth House was, “this book is like if the Mamma Mia island went up in flames.” Where there is revelry, there is critique; two lines that haunt are, “All birthday parties take place over mass graves,” and “America is a comphet dyke.” 

Part of the book (and maybe of life as a Pisces?) revolves around conquering passivity. Breaking through the walls of the twelfth house. This is particularly evident in the literal dialogues between sister signs, as Mbabazi gives life, limerence, and agency to their cosmic caricatures. As the author writes: “Limerence as Craft.” 

Mbabazi leaves us with a new mythos, a dyke mythos, the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether love at first sight exists, whether there is such a thing as star-crossed lovers. They aren’t necessarily concerned with the answers to these questions, but present something like a cross between The Iliad and a natal chart reading: tools to help us examine ourselves. And there’s room for fucking up in self-exploration, which is true, and hard, and beautiful…

“All antagonists deserve a happy ending”

…and this might just be our how-to guide.

The Siren in the Twelfth House by Victoria Mbabazi, Palimpsest Press, 2024, $21.95