Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Creature in Bloom comes to focus through its tender examination of motherhood in its denotative sense with mother as the central figure more than the myriad of selfless sentimentalities the word often connotes. The women in this collection, including Hewitt herself, are messy amalgamations of younger selves complicated by past and current desires—women who are full of love, frustration, success, and failure as they attempt to shape-shift into storybook storylines that reject motherhood’s complexities.
• Hewitt deftly grounds metaphysical inquiry—what is life, is soul, is the future in uncertain times—alongside the full-bodied experience of birthing and mothering children, and somehow, even in our gun-riddled, overheating world, finds the strength to press on.

Poems that moved me:

• “How to Create a Whole Human”
• “Lot’s Wife Speaks of Turning”
• “Eve Speaks from Outside the Belly of the Fish”
• “While Up at 4 am With the Baby, She Remembers Eating Pineapple in Costa Rica”
• “Baba Yaga as Ars Poetica”
• “Mother/Stepmother”

Lines that lingered:

• “Closed my eyes and felt death’s presence, / her long black nails close enough to smell the rot . . .”
• “You see, / it’s not nostalgia that turned my head // but the vision of myself in the before, / all my desires rising / like useless white columns.”
• “An open undoing—the whole pink of me / unravels / when the mouth that cannot utter it / becomes my name.”
• “In this way, / I did wash up on a new shore / dirty, filled with gristle and teeth, / hair tangled as kelp, and this body / made hole in the salt brine.”
• “It’s a comfort, really, to lend the bad acts // to the stepmother. The actual one better off / perfect in her storybook absence.”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• Hewitt operates successfully in both narrative and lyric modes and calls on women from her past and from history, the Bible, and fairytales to voice to the multiplicity of female experiences.
• Poems are largely in free verse, though Hewitt opens with a highly effective prose poem and later includes elegy, pantoum, and ars poetica.
• The penultimate poem, “Good Guy, Bad Guy, Monster,” is an introspective weaving of violent incidents, often including youth, over a five-year period with notes of her own family’s growth, including the birth of her daughter. With her birth, the long poem transitions from prose lines toward shorter lyric lines, perhaps nodding to a parent’s inability to fill every space where the world’s monsters can reach.

This book is in conversation with:

• The maternal instincts of Eavan Boland.
• The focus of Jenny Irish.
• The philosophical curiosity of Don Paterson.

Questions this book made me ask:

• What delineates life as compared to death?
• What is or is not god? What is or is not the soul?
• How are we able to travel across time from memory to memory?
• What myths do we create for ourselves?

Who I would give this book to:

• New mothers seeking to affirm and challenge their experiences.
• Readers who enjoy collections that explore a topic from multiple angles across its sections.