Iridescent Pigeons
Candace Walsh
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024, 82 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Iridescent Pigeons is a fitting title for Candace Walsh’s enchanting debut—a body of work that ponders the many contours of love, that rejoices in the splendour of the everyday and the profound beauty of the overlooked and discounted. In this chapbook, Walsh traverses seamlessly across time and poetic forms, tracing themes of queer love, desire, nature, loss, motherhood, childhood, and the engravings of trauma. Each poem teems with life, beckoning readers to take a second glance, to embrace stillness, drawing us into a heightened state of awareness of ourselves and the environment around us.

Images of nature abound in Iridescent Pigeons as Walsh revels in both the fecundity and the awe-inspiring intricacies of ecological design. In “Then Suddenly I Know” Walsh exults the healing properties bestowed by nature: “Sometimes I can’t get back to sleep, / while lemon balm breathes / let me soothe you beyond the window screen / and frogsong trembles webs seedpearled with dew” (40). Walsh’s poems unveil worlds within worlds that only begin to unfurl to those who remain attentive and curious, to those “who do not shirk from hills and swerves and barks” (17). However, nature is not just a physical phenomenon in these poems, but a site of memory imbued with deep evocative power.

Walsh pays homage to the many queer women poets who came before her, thus situating her work as part of a long lineage of lesbian and queer love poetry and writing. Virginia Woolf is celebrated in Walsh’s cento “Wild and Frail and Beautiful,” composed of lines from Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room. Woolf is again invoked in the poem “I Want To See You in the Lamplight, in Your Emeralds,” (21) the very title of which is a sentence from a love letter written by Woolf to Vita Sackville-West in 1927. The influence of Sappho is also apparent in Walsh’s use of the sapphic stanza. Midway through the collection, “Sapphic stanza 1,” “Sapphic stanza 2,” and “Sapphic stanza 3” connect readers directly to this vibrant queer legacy of desire-driven poetry. Indeed, much of Sappho’s oeuvre today only exists in fragments, and Walsh’s completed compositions can be read not only as a commemoration of the poet, but as a process of historical restoration. However, Sappho’s impact extends beyond poetic form to Walsh’s use of the natural world as a metaphor for queer love and sensuality. In the poem “Not Fell but Fall” Walsh muses, “How do oceans feel / about these languid vagabonds? / Against her skin I knew, I think, / how seaweed feels. / The sea must feel a thing like love” (5).

Iridescent Pigeons speaks to how queer women have historically articulated desire for one another in coded ways, negotiating through a labyrinth of social hostility and marginalisation. Walsh’s poem “Lesbians and Their Dogs” poignantly reflects on this reality: “I think of dogs with docked tails, / their bumpy rumps wagging nothing. / It reminds me of queer love, / how they used to try to / cut off or drug-numb what offended, / how we sniffed out the invisible / and guess-read the signals” (59). These lines honour the lesbians and queer women throughout history who have loved quietly, transgressively, and ferociously in spite of structures that sought/seek to deny our longings and desires. We continue to love because “We know how much it costs / to cut it off” (59).

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a musician, arts worker, and freelance writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.

Old Stranger: Poems
Joan Larkin
Alice James Books, 2024, 100 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Laura Gibbs

Joan Larkin’s Old Stranger records what it means to sit with the discomforting thought of one’s mortality without flinching. As Larkin’s sixth poetry collection, it is the latest addition to a long line of celebrated work that is unceasingly direct, expansive, and unguarded.

The first of the poem’s compact sections, fittingly titled “Girls Department,” deals with the beauty, the awkwardness, and the violence of youth. My personal favourite from this opening sequence is the poem, “Hexagon-Tiled Bathroom Floor”—a transformation of her quotidian childhood experience of staring at tiles into a musing upon the difficulty her adult self will face in achieving intimacy; like the grout between the hexagons, she will stand “aloof from love” (5). There is a certain breathlessness that pervades many of these early poems due to Larkin’s regular deployment of lengthy stanzas and minimal punctuation, as can be seen in “The Body inside My Body,” “Chain of Events,” and “All at Once.” Youth, in these poems, means ceaseless and often destructive movement.

As the reader progresses through the collection into the middle sections, titled “Old Stranger” and “Whisper Not,” a lingering and mournful voice begins to be heard. The once heady and overwhelming atmosphere of youth is bitterly altered as Larkin reflects upon what it means to live in the face of the deaths of others, including her father, in poems like “The Green Box” and “Gilmore Road.” “Show Jumper” is particularly arresting in its melancholy as Larkin’s speaker levels directly with an unknown figure who has fallen from sporting stardom into the throes of suicidal ideation.

“Crouching Woman,” the final section of Larkin’s collection, is a fitting conclusion to the considerations that pervade her collection—from the unspoken alienation of childhood to the inevitable frailty in old age, including a microscopic focus on quotidian details as well as abstract meditations upon the blurred boundary between creation and destruction. Larkin incorporates a meta-artistic perspective into the majority of these poems, such as “Crouching Woman,” dedicated to the French figurative sculptor Camille Claudel, and the visually arresting “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Six Paintings,” in which Larkin’s stark use of white space resembles the inability to avoid the inquisitive glare of the pregnant subject found in the eponymous painter’s Portrait of Myself on my Sixth Wedding Anniversary. Larkin’s contemplation of other artists leads to the crescendo of her final poem, “Ampersand,” where she considers the intersection of her life and poetic craft as “A pregnant roundness” and “a needle threading itself, / a snake encircling Mercury’s staff” (71).

Larkin’s collection could be seen as something of an “Old Stranger” to its readers, in its strange blending of the known and the intimate with what is alienating and, therefore, largely repressed. Old Stranger is a refusal to give in to the binary thinking that would have these juxtaposing modes of human life strictly separated. It is for this reason that I would recommend Larkin’s collection to anyone willing to sit within the unblinking gaze of her most rattling reflections.

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.

Desire Museum
Danielle Cadena Deulen
BOA Editions, 2023, 104 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Desire Museum is a poetry collection navigating the thread of desire across time, relationships, and the female-embodied self. The collection explores and excavates the intricacies of friendship, lesbian love, relationships, and environmental and sociopolitical crises. The poems navigate selfish desire, unselfish desire, desire of the body, of love, of affection, of the world, and of justice, imbued at each angle with an unfinished or unsatisfied longing.

Beginning with symbolism that remains throughout the collection, Deulen paves way for desire as melancholy, as unfulfilled longing, discontent bleeding into regret for what once was and can no longer be. The early pages of the collection set the scene for the speaker’s transparency, often circling back, reasserting, or reassessing, “Searching / for the drawer, I mean the door, I mean my skin” (18) as in the poem “GASLIGHT.”

Deulen expresses desire infused with a lifetime of layers beneath it. The collection endures like a thread of life, of places, people, time, and spaces, mapped across the pages as a gallery of life and human existence alongside desire. In “SELF-DOUBT WITH A CRUCIFIX,” the speaker states, “she sits on her bed, necklace with a crucifix lying / between her breasts […] But I / still feel the slap of the first girl I kissed […]” (36).

Deulen exposes feelings of desire in the body related to regret in unfulfilled longing and hunger for a translation of desire. She yearns for meaning in mythology, and at times is direct with her longing – “either you didn’t love me or you didn’t love me enough” (18) in the poem “WHY I LEFT, WHY I RETURNED” and “you lean in closer for / a secret, but I scream it” (46) in “I CONSIDER YOU SILENCE.” Other times, the longing is elusive– “Only the wind / knows you. Knows you are in the middle / of waiting a long time for something, for someone / to return” (75). Ultimately, Deulen creates a space for the reader to be inspired by and understand their own desire through these texts.

Her most poignant poem is in the final section of the poetry collection, expressed in the long-form poem titled “MUSEUM.” Divided into six numbered sections, the piece reflects Deulen’s attempts to draft the piece dedicated to her friend, Erin James Staffel, who died of suicide. Direct with her language and transparent with her convoluted feelings, the speaker ruminates on memories of love and comfort, reckoning with grief in its layered complexities of sadness, anger, and desire. She follows this piece with a concluding poem, which reaches out to readers, reminding us, “I see you. Know that / echo in your chest means that you want to live” (96). She is reminding us of the spark of desire that lives within us all and keeps us alive.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She has recently completed her undergraduate study double majoring in English and History. Ruby is a lover, writer, artist, and poet, but mainly just a girl in the world.

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.