Book Review

Upon reading Milk for Gall, the debut poetry collection from Natalie Louise Tombasco and winner of the 2023 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press, I was immediately struck by the poet’s use of humor to drive poetry into deeper understanding for readers. Take these opening lines from the collection’s first poem, “Drawbridge + Moat”:

Gingerly, yes,

With the intactness

Of a walled city or coaxed throat that’s been hinged open

By ginseng. I begin with a primordial sigh

Like when Sappho

Lets go of fragments; wind-

Fetch rushing land as wet vengeance. Sighs are swimming in

River mud with frog spawn.

Humor intertwines with a depiction of exhaustion. Tombasco’s collection doesn’t wince; instead, its poetry drives further into a sobering reality: the reality of living as a female in contemporary society. Take poems like “Lolita’s Dissection,” a poem that, among other things, interrogates the male gaze, and “Ferry Song, Half-Sung,” which draws upon the poet’s experiences growing up in Staten Island. Together, these poems offer keen observations and smartly-rendered responses to patriarchy that, to me, recall the early work of Sharon Olds—specifically the iconic poem “The Language of the Brag” from Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980). Tombasco is a poet for this post-Roe moment, with lines that sear like “I threw my baby dolls into the dumpster” in “Peonies in Utero.”

Milk for Gall is divided into three sections: Concrete Realm, Spindle Realm, and Bulb Realm, all of which explore the female experience from various perspectives and avenues. The first section seems to interrogate landscape and the dissolution of landscape, a feminist incantation fueled with righteous incisiveness. The second section seems to turn a focus on themes of food and food-based nurturing and preparation, such as gardening, baking, cooking, and homesteading. The third and final section seems intent on uncovering forms of relief and hope.

One of the aspects I love about Tombasco’s poetry in Milk for Gall is her reoccurring homage to the feminist poets who’ve preceded her. For example, there are several poems with titles that include the names of famous poets, a few of which are “Dream Vision Descending into Dickinson,” “Dream Vision of Sylvia Plath,” and “Dream Vision of Elizabeth Bishop.” These poems cleverly mimic the historical poet’s voice in question, referencing famous lines and images.

In “Drawbridge + Moat,” readers see an epigraph from Marianne Moore and a mention of Sappho. In “Take My Milk,” the poem opens with an epigraph from Gwendolyn Brooks. But perhaps one of my favorite nods is the subtleness weaved into the poem “Deadbeat Beach”:

What have you given me

besides the rotten bottom of the pot,

this salty, deathbed pawnshop

of carapace, fish guts, red Solo cups [. . .]

I am collecting Wonder

Bread bags thinking about carnal love

with the eye of a diving-suited curator,

[. . .] your love

is hypodermic, full of wreckage

Here, there are references to the work of Elizabeth Bishop (“fish guts”) and Adrienne Rich (“diving-suited curator” and “full of wreckage”). The poem also has this lovely line break at “Wonder / Bread bags” that seems as if Tombasco might be turning to bewilderment or even Wonder Woman for help, but reconsiders.

Pop culture plays an amusing role in Tombasco’s poetry; figures in the collection include Anthony Bourdain and Barbie, Amy Winehouse and Jeff Goldblum, Ted Bundy and Brett Kavanaugh. It runs the gamut. Milk for Gall, in essence, is a book of youthful defiance against the oppressing forces of adulthood, a retaliation against the sexism so ever-present in daily living. Take this excerpt of “Viciousness in the Kitchen,” which rails against traditional models of femininity in kitchens: “Whenever I slice into an onion, I think of it / as an origin story.” Again, Tombasco is nodding to history, interrogating her inherited predicament.

Importantly, humor is not simply for humor’s sake in Milk for Gall. The poignancy behind these poems originates from humor then becomes a mirror held up to the reader’s face. The collection could be encapsulated with these opening lines from “Birds!”: “There won’t be a cage in this poem.” Milk for Gall is a continuous reaching for true freedom, never a cage masking as a sky. Consider these lines from “Ghosthood”:

my love—did you like the paranormal doilies I’ve left? the dust I kissed into the asters?

I would drag a UFO through a keyhole

to say I am safe, but when I am walking

I never reach the walls.

Here, the patriarchal containment feels so vast and so constrictive that, despite trying, the speaker is not even able to reach a wall to climb over it. But Milk for Gall is not a book about capitulation. Tombasco seems singularly focused on upending larger societal mechanisms through clever, image-driven observations that coalesce as incantatory revolt. The speaker’s experiences of early womanhood, as told through vivid display and accompanied with a constant refusal to take anything at face value, leave readers reeling and spinning to the very end. Milk for Gall is a book about how to live beyond—in spite and despite.