Nest of Matches
Amie Whittemore
Autumn House Press, 2024, 80 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Kelsey McGarry

In Nest of Matches, Whittemore skillfully blends longing, queerness, eroticism, love, loss, and grief with the natural world. This beautiful poetry collection is an exploration and meditation on cycles; the life cycles of humans and animals, the moon cycle, astrological and zodiac cycles, the life and blooming of flowers, relationships, queer identity, and more.

The book is embedded with the contradictions of being alive, especially the dichotomies that can feel innate to queer identity. A series of poems titled “Another Queer Love Poem that Fails” mourns works of art and expression that fall short. In several poems, Whittemore celebrates the possibilities of transfiguration within queerness and recognizes the connections and resilience that queerness often brings.

In “Blue Moon,” Whittemore incorporates phrases from the namesake song by The Marcels, finding renewed meaning in the song’s lyrics while providing another tender addition to the series of poems on the moon cycle. In “Butterfly Bandage,” she remembers her caretaker grandparents and finds comfort in the tending that caretakers can provide long after they are gone, through their memories and the relics they leave behind. In “Libra Questionnaire,” she answers hard-hitting questions about patterns of those born under a Libra sky, using Google’s suggested searches. She answers these astrological questions with authority, consistently giving sincere thought and reverence to every subject.

Each poem is personal and relevant to the aim of loving oneself and the world; Whittemore explicitly reflects on the struggle of self-love for queer people. She describes the beauty in all of earth’s creatures, finding hope in each and every living thing–from her ancestors, to foxes, to the moon.

From walks in poppy fields to observing the full bloom of a peony, the collection reads like a sweet walk through both earthly and astral meadows. She creates a natural world so appealing that it feels like a dreamworld, while expertly reminding us that the most beautiful visions of all are found in our everyday surroundings, like the flowers we see, the moon that guides our evenings, the waves, and the presence of our ancestors in the natural world.

This collection of poems feels like an aching love letter to desire in the queer body. There is at once a wisdom and a deep vulnerability in each poem, which does not seem accidental; this mixture is an intentional, calculated balance. The collection inspires the reader to appreciate the holiness in both stillness and the natural elements that move all too quickly.

Kelsey McGarry is a Sinister Wisdom intern and volunteer based in Los Angeles, CA. She is interested in queer history and archiving, scheming, and being outside.

poyums
Len Pennie
Canongate Books, 2024, 128 pages
$22.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Len Pennie (or @misspunnypennie as she’s known on Instagram) is a Scottish poet specializing in the Scots language, one of the indigenous languages of Scotland. Her collection covers several topics of varying weight, from descriptions of and experiences with abuse to lighthearted poems on daily life. As a survivor, she boldly uses her platform to shine a light on abuse and empower survivors. Her work is moving in its honest depictions of life during and after abuse. She describes the power each individual holds within themselves to persist on the long road to recovery. I had the pleasure of hearing her read her poetry live; you can hear her emphatic voice in writing as much as in her voice on the stage–her words and her power are her own. She writes, “This story is mine” (91).

Continuing the theme of identity, Pennie pens “Ouroboros.” The poem provides a succinct description of responsibility in abuse. She writes, “And I get it, but there’s not one single excuse / That absolves an abuser of giving abuse: / Not the alcohol, drugs or the childhood or me; / Not your grief for the man that you thought you would be” (50). The entire poem grapples with identity through abuse, the importance of placing responsibility for abuse solely on abusers, and the power Pennie’s poetry brings her.

Part of the experience of reading poyums comes from Pennie’s phenomenal use of Scots. poyums provides readers the opportunity to delve into the beauty of the language at every turn of the page. She not only introduces readers to an inside view of survivorship but also introduces many to a vulnerable language. Pennie’s writing in poyums places the language directly in the hands of those unfamiliar with Scots, which is not widely used in written form outside of some regions of Scotland. Notably, there is no glossary showing the exact meaning of the words, so readers must take the time to explore the language on their own. Curious readers can watch her ‘Scots Word of the Day’ online to learn more about some of the words frequenting her writing.

One great use of Scots is in her poem “Chattin Shite,” where she writes, “Awright, hen, hope you don’t mind, A couldnae help but see / A conversation taking place that didnae involve me; / Never fear, sweet gentle lass, A’m here tae set that right, / Cause aw a lassie needs tae hear is a men there chattin shite” (26). Her use of language aptly portrays the frustration she felt with a man inserting himself into a conversation that doesn’t involve him. Pennie has faced notable backlash online for her feminist work, receiving extensive misogynistic abuse, which she cleverly responds to through a number of her poems. She sets out clear guidance for those who have treated her unacceptably: “If ye didnae want the poetry, dinnae fuck over a poet” (14). Speaking out against abuse, even when confronted with various forms of it so often, is an act of profound courage and defiance that chips away at oppressive structures, empowering others to join the fight for equality and justice.

poyums is an exceptional work, powerfully describing survivorship and offering a connective balm to all who share the experience. For many, poyums is a declaration of ‘you are not alone in this.’ For many more, it provides a window of empathy for survivors’ realities that helps us connect, support each other, and work to prevent abuse. I truly cannot express enough respect for Len Pennie and poyums.

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers as a copyeditor for Sinister Wisdom. They manage a non-profit in the UK that supports survivors of abuse. They also ghostwrite and illustrate part-time.

Your Dazzling Death: Poems
Cass Donish
Knopf, 2024, 128 pages
$24.00

Reviewed by Lya Hennel

Written for their late partner and poet Kelly Caldwell, in the aftermath of Kelly’s suicide, Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death is a beautiful and shattering elegy, taking us on a journey where love and grief meld as one.

In Your Dazzling Death, Cass invites us into a realm where everything can coexist. In their writing, present and past blend together; dreams meet reality and what could have been.

The collection paints their previous life together, starting with memories. Those poems are at once an ode to queer love, transness, and infinite transformation through the process of grief.

One can read it almost like an ongoing conversation with Kelly, in life and after, or as an altar to her. We share their mundane as much as their magic–the unforgettable, the precious moments which are striking with their beauty. Cass finds words where they are hard to find–in the in-betweens, capturing remarkably the immensity of grief. The absence someone leaves when they “shake themselves out of the world,” the questions we are left with, and “the question of surviving this” (5, 34, 77, 101).

The poet takes us to their next life, the one where Kelly is no longer. “Let me paint this / entire country / the colors of your face / the last time I / saw you alive” (6). In the face of loss, we witness the isolation of dealing with one’s grief as a global pandemic unfolds.

Different timelines and realities, one where “In another life / that’s how we go: that day, together. [...] You never make it to your other death” (18). Donish rewrites the present and the past, and creates infinite possibilities for them.

The theme of transness weaves through themes of rebirth and the constant state of becoming. Transcending as a way to become whole, responding to different rules, the same way grief suspends time, yet the world keeps moving.

“my is-are-were, have-been-is [...] I mourn you-her, her-you, who were born-dreamed [...] yet reinvented through an inner radiance, the radiance of a name, the name that is yours, the radiance that is-was yours” (33).

Nature is omnipresent in their words, they are magical instances, yet grounding. In the poem “Similitude,” lichen becomes a verb, and Kelly becomes part of everything.

Your Dazzling Death is an essential book that should be read more than once. With each reading, more layers unfold. It has been written as a companion book to Kelly Caldwell’s Letters to Forget.

Lya Hennel (they/them) is a Sinister Wisdom intern from France based in London, UK. They are passionate about queer art and literature, creating, and daydreaming.

Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants and Intimate Conversations
Lauren Crux
Many Names Press, 2023, 166 pages
$25.00

Reviewed by Marilyn DuHamel

Lauren Crux, a Santa Cruz, California writer and photographer, has recently published a stunning, singular book titled Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants and Intimate Conversations. Through the years, I’ve been in awe of her many talents: writer, poet, photographer, and performer.

Lauren’s book came out during a very busy time in my life, but once I had it in my hands, I had to take a peek. Soon, I was reading page after page after page and found myself—sometimes in the course of a single page—chortling, tearing up, raising my eyebrows, putting my hand on my heart, or pausing as I gazed upwards, savoring an unexpected insight. Finally, I had to wrench myself away because I wanted to sink into each ramble. The book is that compelling.

Yet, describing this collection is a challenge because it defies categorization, which is part of what I love about it. I turn to the words of another wonderful writer, Camille T. Dungy, who manages to capture the book’s essence:

“The language here is sheer poetry, but these are not meant to be read as poems. They are tiny letters, photographs, journal entries, “rants and intimate conversations,” all of these together and more. On each candid page, Crux reveals what she sees, how she feels, how she hurts, how she celebrates” (Dungy, October 2021).

The work also has an equally important visual element: each short writing is paired with one of Lauren’s original abstract photographs. She stresses that the images are meant to be in conversation with the writing, not to illustrate it. In the words of the poet Gary Young, “[these are] photographs that neither illustrate, nor make any suggestion as to how the poems should be read—are simply companions on the journey of this moving collection” (Young, October 2021).

Lauren’s style is pithy, provocative, and poignant. It’s funny, irreverent, and heartbreaking. Exploring moments and intervals on either side of the rush, rush, rush of daily life, she claims her ordinariness without fuss. “You know, sometimes it feels good to get out and be a lesbian. And sometimes, it feels equally good to stay at home and be a lesbian” (Ramble #34).

She takes on many topics, ranging from the commonplace (and sometimes goofy) moments of daily life to the times that stun us into silence or fury. For example, when the cancer doctor says to her lover, “If you are done with your breasts have a mastectomy,” (Ramble #47), we not only register horror, but we laugh and cry in these moments. She describes her own sense of momentary helplessness and despair in the face of contemporary geopolitical trauma—“I feel scraped raw” (Ramble #22).

With a humorous and witty gentle touch, Lauren asks us to hold fire and ice simultaneously; she insists on complexity of existence, because, “The heart will understand” (“Life Review,” following Ramble #64).

Lastly, when I have traveled in the past, I never can manage to avoid checking a bag, in part because I take too many books. On this last trip, I was determined to just take a carry-on. I winnowed down my clothing, tossed out the third pair of shoes, and took only one book. Difficult Beauty is what made the cut. Like a well-chosen shirt or pair of pants that work for any occasion, I knew this book would take care of me, whatever my mood, whatever my needs.

Marilyn DuHamel is drawn to wilderness—internal and external—and has worked in forestry and fire look-out towers, then as a psychotherapist for the last three decades. Moved by her experiences of call and response with the more-than-human world, her current book project and her blog, Earth Dialogues, explore connections with the natural world and archetypal realms of dreams and synchronicities. Her writing has appeared in Kosmos Journal, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, the anthology Second Wind, and blog postings for Native Animal Rescue. She lives outside of Santa Cruz, California, surrounded by old-growth chaparral.

Palimpsest
Courtney Heidorn
Bottlecap Press, 2024, 28 pages
$10.00

Reviewed by Sara Ricci

Love Through the Sweetness of a Strawberry: A Review of Courtney Heidorn’s Palimpsest

The strawberry serves as a focal point in Courtney Heidorn’s new poetry collection, Palimpsest. From the first pages, the author translates the act of slicing the sweet fruit into pieces into a tender beginning of pure eroticism and intense passion felt towards another woman. However, Heidorn’s work in this context, the simple and everyday act of cutting and preparing, also measures the passage of time. From “strawberry summer I” to “strawberry summer II,” the scene changes, or rather, it progresses, effectively conveying the idea of inevitable, slow, and perfectly natural change. Here, in the midst of quartering the strawberry, the light of the first episode dims and fades, just as the invisible barriers of a relationship seem to intensify with every single movement of the blade slicing through the juicy, ready bodies of the strawberries.

This intensification reaches its peak in the third episode, “strawberry summer III”: the woman present in the first part of this narrative seems to disappear, leaving only the strawberry, which thus becomes the entire foundation, the fundamental representation of the author’s most intimate intentions. The shift in perception is an indicator of evolution: Courtney Heidorn grows and changes; she too progresses, as if to say, “Now I know myself and can afford not to alter what overwhelms me.” Empowered by this growth, she does not need to flee from her emotions. The strawberry remains the same, only divided in two, and most importantly, still attached to the green stem, which adds that edgy but necessary bitterness to the familiarity of the fruit’s sweetness on the tongue.

What emerges in Heidorn’s work, in their “touching, searching,” is the inherent need to be discovered, understood, and desired, with the intention “to beg / for something you didn’t know you needed.” In the deeply sought intimacy of the relationships they describe, Courtney is fully human: they savor, live, and recount with embarrassment for their “overfilled heart,” despite always being met with the caring availability of the one they address.

With a rhythm “enchanted” by sweetness—but also infused with cruelty—Palimpsest rediscovers the quintessential sapphic love and more: it emphasizes the importance of exploring the darkest depths of the self to uncover and learn to navigate one’s habits, starting from the history and concrete essence of the author. Here, Courtney Heidorn is completely and unapologetically open to the reader, who consequently becomes a friend and a listener. A must-read!

Sara Ricci is an editor and a writer from Bitonto, Italy. She graduated in southern Italy in foreign languages, and she is now an intern at Sinister Wisdom. She is an editor and writer for Gazzetta Filosofica, an Italian magazine about philosophy applied to things of everyday life. She also appears in other Italian magazines, such as Fatti Per La Storia, L’Indiscreto, and Kairos.

The Velvet Book
Rae Gouirand
Cornerstone Press, 2024, 124 pages
$21.95

Daughter
Maureen Eppstein
Finishing Line Press, 2024, 42 pages
$19.79

woke up no light: poems
Leila Mottley
Knopf, 2024, 128 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Henri Bensussen

Three Books about Life and Death: Poems Both Sweet and Tart, Like Certain Desserts

The Velvet Book opens with quotes from three poems by Lucie Brock-Broido that reference velvet as a robe, a curtain (“Carnivorous”), a metaphor for a school of courtesan (“Still Life with Aspirin”), and as an animal pelt (“Fame Rubies”). This last description is prefaced by “The diagnosis is not possible.” Gouirand’s couplets across the ninety-one pages of this book-length poem are a response to Brock-Broido’s request, before she died in 2018, to “remember me.”

There was a “time of velvet,” and Gouirand wants to remember it in every way, in all its velvety manifestations, as speech, bone-hard, or softly textured in deep or pale color. She moves through the poem like an archivist to save the memories of the love they shared, what they experienced together, and how it is to be left as the loved partner slowly drifts away and disappears. Gouirand wants to capture every feeling, every dream and thought, to write them into an ode to her beloved Lucie and to those lovers everywhere we have lost/will lose as we age.

Her language is written in velvet, with grammar drenched in velvet metaphor. “I could duplicate the velvet book,” she writes. The Velveteen Rabbit is a children’s book about a stuffed toy rabbit in love with the young boy who owns it–so in love it wishes it could become a “real” rabbit. That cannot happen unless the boy “loves it enough.” Gouirand writes her love out in words as “real” as possible, as if she might bring her beloved back to life by doing so.

Rae Gouirand is the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018) and Open Winter (Bellday Books, 2011), as well as four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She has received numerous fellowships and awards for her poetry and nonfiction.

Maureen Eppstein’s Daughter is also about death, in her case, a first pregnancy that ended with a “stillbirth,” a word that foretells the penultimate moment of expulsion into personhood, the fateful stillness of a life that lives only as a memory. She pours out her story in small poems, releasing history and the emotions she had buried, now, at age eighty-six. These poems are the chapters in a tale of a young woman, married less than a year, about to give birth, and the doctor who didn’t believe her, who said don’t call me at 3 a.m. She trusted him; after all, she’d been brought up to care for others, obey directions, and to not make a fuss.

Not allowed to mourn, she must stay silent, she must “carry on”; she was simply “ill.” Years later, widowed, living alone near the sea and surrounded by a community of women, she finally lets herself acknowledge the truth of it and allows herself to honor this daughter, naming her “Jane.” She visits the grave in a New Zealand cemetery, where she hears voices of the dead: “we are the birds,” they whisper. At home, the swallows build a nest above her kitchen door. She watches them fledge. She feels the connection with nature in “an interwoven chain of being.” These are poems of resilience and hope that nurture us with life and comfort us even in death.

Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maureen Eppstein earned an M.A. in History from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, before moving to the U.S. in the late 1960s. She now lives on the Mendocino Coast of California and is a former executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Her work is strongly influenced by the poetry of Jane Hirshfield, with whom she has studied. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The focus in her poetry on the connectedness of all living things stems from the experience of visiting her stillborn daughter’s burial site, as described in this collection.

Leila Mottley, former Youth Poet of Oakland, CA, brings us her first book of poetry, following her debut novel Nightcrawling (Knopf, 2022), a New York Times best-seller and winner of major awards. Hers is a voice of the future, acknowledging death and danger but focused on life as she’s living it. It is a voice of anger at injustice and for a future of love without the old “shalt nots.” Hers is a voice of youthful exuberance and revolutionary statement.

woke up no light is divided into four types of “hood”: Girl, Neighbor, False, Woman, with a prologue about Reparations. She writes, “I am neither child or woman,” in the Girlhood section, and “a man is not a body—he is a warning.” By the Womanhood section, she is learning love and trust.” In the poem “How to love a woman sailing the sky,” she writes, “I flinched / until you showed me you / were not reaching through me / but for me / and then I was Yours.”

This is a physically tall and internally honest book from a young woman we are called to hear and respect. As Mahogany Browne states on the book’s back cover, it’s “a revolution of words and worlds… Mottley aims to set us all free.” As Maureen Eppstein shows in her poems how women are so often raised to obey and suffer, and as Rae Gouirand portrays through her velvet metaphors of remembrance and love, Leila Mottley sails us into a new climate for women of personal strength and agency, in charge of our own lives.

Henri Bensussen writes on themes of inter-personal/inter-species relationships, aging, and the comic aspects of the human condition from the viewpoint of a birder, biologist, and gardener. Currently, a book-length memoir is her focus, and she continues to publish poetry and creative non-fiction.

Black Girl, Call Home
Jasmine Mans
Berkley, 2021, 256 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Grace Gaynor

I have always struggled to claim my girlhood, to look back on my time spent as a child and believe in the purpose and worth I possessed as a young Black girl. For many Black women, this turmoil is recognizable, especially when a multitude of portrayals and celebrations of girlhood are built upon depictions of femininity steeped in whiteness. Since my first reading of Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans, I’ve carried my copy everywhere, the fully realized depiction of Black girlhood always feeling familiar and empowering. The love with which Mans discusses the experiences of Black girls and women is powerful enough to permeate the frost of a culture that disregards those who have been categorized as Black and female. In her book, Mans carefully considers the lives of Black girls and women and discusses a wide array of experiences, from meticulous cultivation of appearance and identity to the pressure of fitting in. With powerful and revealing messages that culminate in an intricate portrayal of existence as a Black girl, Black Girl, Call Home speaks to and with those who are often ignored in our society.

As a collection that acknowledges the intricate experiences of Black girls, Black Girl, Call Home aptly opens with two poems that discuss the beauty standards associated with Black girlhood. The first piece, entitled “I Ain’t Gon’ Be Bald Headed No More,” utilizes its simplicity to poignantly call attention to the pressure placed on Black girls to be hyper-conscious of physical appearance. As the speaker discusses her plans to get her hair done, she remarks that her hair has grown and goes on to say: “when I wear it out at school, / the rest of the girls / won’t call me bald-headed / no more” (2). The speaker feels that her chance to be considered acceptable and beautiful rests on the length and style of her hair, an idea further emphasized through the lines “Imma be pretty, / as soon as momma gets home / from work” (2). The speaker’s knowledge of the beauty standards that are constantly applied to her existence is revealed by her innate correlation between hair and being perceived as pretty. The following piece, “Momma Has a Hair Salon in the Kitchen,” takes the form of a lengthy list of items, terms, and sayings traditionally associated with taking care of Black hair. Throughout the piece, Mans juxtaposes words such as “poison” and “natural,” demonstrating the confusing messages that Black girls and women receive regarding their hair. Along with the previous piece, this poem further emphasizes the complicated nature of Black existence, especially in conjunction with the process of cultivating femininity.

For Black girls, noncompliance with the appearance and self-identity norms fabricated by those around them signifies a magnification of the oppression they face daily, demonstrated through retrospective pieces in Black Girl, Call Home. In “Momma Said Dyke at the Kitchen Table,” the speaker describes the experience of being told to refrain from adopting certain self-expressions simply because of categorization as a Black girl. This experience is exemplified through the reaction of the speaker’s mother to her coming out: “don’t you know / how hard it already is / for women like us, / why you gonna go / and make it harder on yourself?” (23). Mans utilizes this interaction to allude to the experiences of Black girls who do not comply with gender expectations, as Black women and girls are already alienated from the “ideals” of femininity because of racial categorization. The analysis of this experience sheds light on the difficulties Black women and girls face when they break away from the norms applied to them on the axis of race, sexuality, and gender identity.

The unique lives of Black girls and women are often not valued within our society because they have not been visible in conjunction with the work to uplift, empower, and acknowledge those experiencing girlhood and womanhood. Black Girl, Call Home not only demonstrates an effort to shed light on the lives of Black girls and women, but it treats these experiences with care. In her stunning collection, Jasmine Mans utilizes poetry to reveal the intricacies, triumphs, and struggles associated with Black girlhood in a way that Black girls and women deserve.

Grace Gaynor is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She earned her BA in English from Hollins University and is currently an MFA student studying creative writing at Virginia Tech. She is a Sinister Wisdom intern and serves as an editor for the minnesota review and SUNHOUSE Literary.

The Glass Studio
Sandra Yannone
Salmon Poetry, 2024, 98 pages
$13.03

Reviewed by Karen Poppy

How does one reckon with a father and with family, and how does one reckon with growth and grief? In The Glass Studio, Sandra Yannone does so expertly, combining the painful, sharp shards and melding them into costly, prismatic beauty. She dedicates this poetry collection in memory of her father and paternal grandmother, two family members whose inexorable influence on Yannone (and her responding tenderness towards them) is palpable.

Within Yannone’s collection, we find family and patriarchal myths pieced together. The myths, like the stained glass, fused and shimmering, are dangerous and alluring in their creation and perpetuation, but an art form of liberation when we act in their dismantling. Dismantling myths is a key component of the quest for love and understanding. On the journey to reach love and understanding, one of the poems, “The Properties of Glass,” explains that “we are not anywhere / a map can call / home. We are not anywhere / a map can comprehend” (76).

To gain wisdom and reach love and understanding for ourselves, we must look back towards home. We must return to our familial origins, which Yannone deftly retraces in The Glass Studio. She writes that like a lover gifted “a petite, stout jar / of tap water and sea glass / worn down / by years / of turbulent waves / and rocks,” we learn about “the things that have cut me open and made me bleed” (9). Time smooths over the shared vulnerabilities and beautifies pain caused by sharpness. Pain becomes stained glass, glistening in waves of words, and loving; imperfect family members roll in the poetic, rocky deep.

The book’s structure maintains the varied patterns and repetitions of stained glass, divided into four parts, with four poems titled “The Glass Studio,” mirroring the book’s title. In the aforementioned poem in the book’s third section, the speaker looks back at her fourteen-year-old self in her father’s stained glass art studio, stuck in time and place, symbolically and in a photograph. Yannone writes of a photograph taken on

“an early morning in my father’s makeshift sweatshop / on the unfinished second floor of my grandparents’ house, / leaning over beige glass squares arranged / in a plaster-poured mold, my Red Sox cap / cocked backwards like a trigger / waiting for release…” (62).

We see the speaker through this photograph, this memory, “cocked backwards like a trigger” (like her Red Sox cap), seemingly frozen at this moment but ready for release.

The speaker looks back, older and wiser, with wisdom informing her of ways the family system poisoned and trapped her. She describes coming of age through her father’s craft and the patriarchy’s myth—rendering splendor and dazzling truth from toxicity. Wisdom allows for a slow, thawing release, not the quick pull of a trigger, in this poem and throughout the collection. Yannone is released from patriarchal myth as she finds release from family myth through retelling her story. In patriarchal myth, the gorgon, with coiled snakes writhing on her head, has such a gruesome appearance that men turn to stone merely by looking at her. The powerful gorgon, once revered as a protectress and representative of women who healed others, becomes fearsome and ugly—and dangerous—within the patriarchy’s story.

For the speaker, the coiled snakes melt in the making of stained glass into seams, bringing together and holding the glass, which appears beautiful in the light but is as brittle as male fragility. Those socialized as female learn at a young age that their power must melt away- that they must pacify and hold everything together. They must make everything beautiful. The speaker also learned this skill from her father in making stained glass:

“my left hand / steadying the burning soldering iron / while I push coiled snakes of lead / into the iron’s hot tip to melt them / into quick silver seams, fusing / those cut glass squares / into translucently beautiful panes / if I hold them up to the light / breaking through the second floor / window” (62). The melting of the gorgon’s coiled snakes is as harmful and poisonous as it is difficult: “I sweat through this labor. / I breathe in the noxious fumes” (62).

Within this toxicity, there is also genuine love and important teaching from the speaker’s father. Yannone transforms her father’s example from destructiveness into healing, sapphic passion. She ultimately transforms what breaks women through her precise and gentle lovemaking:

“I wear no protective mask. My hot pink / lungs slow burn towards death. Hour / after hour, I run my hands like this, iron / and lead, like over the seams of women’s bodies / it will take years for me to touch. / I use the same precision to bring them / full circle, to where they become / translucent. / My father will teach me all this / with squares of cut glass, not ever / saying the word “sex,” without ever / claiming to transfer the knowledge of how / he broke my mother’s body / to create something sacred / akin to a family” (62-63).

This review ends with fitting words from another poem in this collection: “And in response to my longing, / I burn the toast” (68).

Karen Poppy has a debut full-length collection, Diving at the Lip of the Water, published by Beltway Editions (2023), and lauded by the legendary Judy Grahn for its demonstration of “paradox and power.” She has two chapbooks published with Finishing Line Press, and another chapbook published with Homestead Lighthouse Press: Crack Open/Emergency, our own beautiful brutality, and Every Possible Thing.

Dragstripping: Poems
Jan Beatty
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024, 112 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Jan Beatty’s Dragstripping explores identity, trauma, and resilience interwoven with self-discovery. The journey begins with “Sanctified,” a homage to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, setting the frank tone of the collection in her description of the nightclub scene: “real is real / that in the nightclub wailing and the strap-on guitars / there’s no happy ending / just the blues shouters / scorching / sanctified.” From there, she dives into what the back cover deems “the ecstatic after violence.”

Beatty’s Dragstripping draws on several meanings of drag and stripping, particularly concerning identity, the self, and body, while drawing on the imagery of drag racing. A dragstrip is a 402.33-meter stretch where races take place with burnt-out tires peeling toward the finish. In the poem “Drag,” Beatty thrusts readers into the depths of her childhood trauma, reviewing the moments where familial bonds frayed and her selfhood forged amidst adversity. She describes her time in an orphanage, the complicated relationship with her mother, and how families don’t make sense, given her life experiences, saying, “my heart’s dragstripped / from the shredded tires of predators.” Despite the trauma’s lingering, visible effects, she’s resilient. She challenges the reader to “throw the red flag down” and watch her overcome all expectations in the face of life’s challenges as she flies down the track towards the finish line.

Early in the collection lies “Dragstripping,” a reflection on desire and self-discovery, which I consider the heart of the collection thematically. This piece plays into “drag” and “stripping” in a way that may be more familiar to queer folks less keen on cars. Beatty writes about their experiences with a stripper and the complication of (what I perceived to be) gender. She says, “I couldn’t even say what she had / but I wanted it.” In the poem’s conclusion, Beatty comes to understand and explain finding exactly what she wanted. In this poem, the author navigates the complexities of desire and longing, focusing on the divided self.

The divided self is a recurring theme within Dragstripping, and the author passionately celebrates what she often calls the “split.” “Some people say that half isn’t anything / but it will drive an ocean back / to the center,” she notes. In “Scarline,” she further confronts the fractured nature of her identity. Yet, amidst the fractures, there is a fierce determination to reclaim agency and autonomy. In “I Ran into Water,” Beatty grapples with the confines of the body, seeking liberation in defiance of societal norms. The imagery of “striker boots” and “heel irons” speaks to a defiant spirit, unapologetically carving out space in a world that seeks to confine and define.

Dragstripping is a testament to poetry’s power to excavate the depths of human experience. Beatty’s work invites readers to witness the complexities of identity and resilience after trauma.

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers for Sinister Wisdom. They manage a nonprofit in the UK and ghostwrite part-time. Their research appears in The Journal of Intersectional Social Justice, and their ghostwriting appears in The Independent, Solicitors Journal, and City A.M.

The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023)
Beatrix Gates
Thera Books, 2023, 300 pages
$22.95

Reviewed by Laura Gibbs

In The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023), Beatrix Gates offers an enchantingly diverse collection of poems, both published and new to the presses. Despite their vast temporal and thematic differences, all of the poems presented here share a striking sense of emotional honesty.

This edition of new and selected poems paints an intricate and intimate portrait of Gates’s admirable poetic career. As well as the collections published as part of The Burning Key, Gates’s work has appeared in journals such as Sinister Wisdom and The Kenyon Review and anthologized in Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (St. Martin’s, 1988), The World in US: Lesbian & Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (St. Martin’s, 2000), and Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995). By including poems written from 1973 to 2023, The Burning Key offers a detailed and thoughtful sense of Gates’s poetic journey. The collection provides us with intense and distilled snapshots of moments along this journey, from the haunting strangeness of Shooting at Night (1980) to the accepting resignation of a constantly changing nature in desire lines (2020). The collection comes to feel like a museum of a life–its artifacts are displayed with precise curatorial care so as to best reflect the visionary wisdom that blazes through even Gates’s shortest poems.

One of the most arresting sections of The Burning Key is the New & Reclaimed Poems. These previously unseen or revised poems are notable for their refreshing sense of vitality. The poem “Sunspots,” for example, has a visceral effect on the reader through its unusual lineation and rich soundscape. “Outpost” is another standout from this section, with its playful prosodic construction and breathlessly quick movement.

The poems included from Gates’s 1998 collection In the Open provide some of the most emotionally complex and lyrically challenging moments of The Burning Key. The poem “Cut Scenes” details intense feelings of loss interspersed with an appreciative recognition of the beauty of the natural world around the speaker. “Flowing Out, Away,” possibly my favourite poem in The Burning Key, provides a moment of exquisite stillness and minute reflection, as “[t]he wicker chair / becomes the one who feels / no love and shines hard / through the white paint.”

Another benefit of the vastness of the temporal selection provided in The Burning Key is that it allows us to see developments as well as to make connections across Gates’s poetic career. The formal experiments of the 2006 collection Ten Minutes, for example, where Gates consistently tries her hand at the prose poem, can be connected to her playfulness with form in desire lines, where the poem’s attention to seasonality and transience is reflected in its terse lines and white space spread over multiple pages.

Overall, Gates’s The Burning Key is a fitting celebration of an illustrious poetic career. The collection is a testament to Gates’s visionary verse, her commitment to exposing painful truths, and offering hope through resistance.

Laura Gibbs is a former Sinister Wisdom intern and master’s student based in Scotland. Her poetry has been published in Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Gentian. Her hobbies include spending all her money in bookstores and sitting by the sea. You can follow her on Instagram @lauramusing.