Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Overcoming
• Being heard
• Being listened to
• How to recover yourself (and the world) post-pandemic
• Folklore, fairytale, and myth as allegory for understanding how goddamn awful we can be to each other and the rage that ensues
• The responsibilities we have to our partners and our children when the world feels like/is falling around us
• Regaining confidence post-trauma, even if you’re unsure of yourself, even if it takes multiple tries to find a way to someplace new and (hopefully) better for us

Poems that moved me:

• “Moses”
• “Exit”
• “Specter”
• “The Sweating Sickness”
• “Abortion Poem”
• “Nike, Medusa, Jocasta, Split”
• “The Moons of Pluto”

Lines that lingered:

• “Nobody really / believes in hell. That’s not true. Lots / of people do and you did too. I don’t. / Do I?”
• “When I speak in my most heretical voice, / he will know.”
• “I have never owned the sun before / but before I had one son I dreamed another.”
• “Barefoot, / the shoeless executioner / danced, did dance, / did reckon, did reap, did / unhead the air / tight around my / neck.”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• Complex strings of similes and metaphors that drive into the core of the speaker’s relationships, like with the speaker’s dead ex in “Noose” or “Leda.”
• Interlocking pairs of villanelles in which the third stanza of the first villanelle in each pair is the first stanza of the second (see Notes for how to read them in this sequence because they’re not ordered in the book this way).
• Wide range of line lengths, ebbing and flowing from poem to poem to allow each to breathe at their own pace.
• A new “form”/mode where the speaker describes how first, second, third, or even fourth drafts developed as the poem progresses (“Revision with Miscarriage and Man in the Moon” and “Revision with Playground and Seizure”).

This book is in conversation with:

• Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience
• Edith Hamilton’s Mythology
• Leah Umansky’s Of Tyrant
• Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives
• Shakespeare

Questions this book made me ask:

• What is my responsibility to myself, my family, and my community in creating a new sense of being in the world after a global pandemic?
• How can I be more honest as a poet?
• How can I be more daring as one?
• If we will always carry grief and trauma, how do we use these wounds to empower us instead of limit us?

Who I would give this book to:

• Poets not writing because of emotional reticence, an inability to find the right structures for their work, or *waves hands wildly* all this.
• People struggling with complex feelings of grief.
• Anyone who needs to recognize there are people who feel the same rage they do and are working to channel it into positive, life-affirming action.