This Insatiable August

by Maureen Clark 

(Signature Books, 2024) 

Reviewed by Isaac Richards

 

Love and loss are the wrong words to describe Maureen Clark’s sharp and delicious debut. Try “rush and push,” “magic, hysteria, melancholy, desire,” or even “a curse, a blessing, a corporeal thing.” Clark’s is a collection of life, “the frantic thing / that looked like living,” and death, like “the body and the red tricycle” found at the bottom of a river. Sex, bodies, family trauma, and God—they’re all here, wrapped up in poems as timeless and eternal as they are grounded in “the violet crush of this messy planet” (76). 

If that’s too much to handle, Clark lets us take it in sections (like oranges, tangerines, apricots or peaches). The book’s first section, “As It Turns Out,” is comprised primarily of love poems addressed by the speaker to their beloved. Section two, “Two-Way Radio,” is devoted mostly to ancestry and family history. Section three, “Thin Hymn,” turns toward God, often in the direct address of the psalmist. Section four, “Surfacing,” weaves these former themes (lover, family, deity) together in a conclusion that simultaneously resists resolution. 

But such categorizing oversimplifies Clark’s point about preferring ambiguity to order. Indeed, all those muses and more can be found in the first poem of the first section, titled, “Most of All a Future.” The speaker declares: “I won’t go to a heaven without sagebrush or mosquito bites or thistle itch.” “I’m not going if there’s no sex. … Real orgasmic sex.” Clark knows that to be human is to “want the splinter so it can be removed.” And yet the poet, in this and so many other poems, longs “most of all [for] a future” as the concluding poems also demonstrate. 

Meanwhile, definition is one of Clark’s favorite poetic techniques. A man is “a quiet island.” “The ear is an erotic instrument.” In two of the most striking poems in the collection, “Getting it Wrong” and “Premature Autopsy,” hands probing a body become a metaphor for life, death, love, and violence all at once. Note this startling description of Andreas Vesalius, founder of anatomy, “in his room with the pilfered body of a woman / recently dead”: 

His hands swim in the messy fluids

mapping her interior places,

muscles in candlelight, the bright knife

glistening in the body’s envelope.

“Even in this soft place I am pierced,” writes Clark in the next poem, for, “Your body in my hands / is a cello.” And yet Clark is careful to occasionally break her readers’ willing suspension of disbelief. Too much intimacy is countered with some productive uncertainty. “These words will embarrass you in public,” the speaker admits in the final poem of the opening section; “You could be anyone as it turns out.” The indeterminacy of the “you” in these opening poems makes them parables not just about love but relationality in general—the “you” is anyone, anything we desire. Clark is pointing, above all, to the ineffable: 

Take this library full of books, 

erase all the words in them. 

This is how it feels to write it down.

Section two begins with a reversal. “It would be interesting to do it all backwards / start out old and grow young,” with “cataracts clearing / before your very eyes.” 

Imagine the startling climax, foreplay after. 

Following looks. Remorse before the sin. Temptation

a dangling leftover.

These lines are carefully composed, climaxing in the center, using a comma to indicate after and thus saving foreplay for the end of the sentence syntactically. Temptation dangles at the edge of a line break, leftover. Following leads looks, just as remorse comes before sin grammatically and prepositionally. It’s really a masterwork that reflects what decades of teaching writing can accomplish. Rereading reveals the rewards of Clark’s craft. 

The second section also contains two marvelous sestinas. They are exemplars of the form and rich with meaning. In one, a rumination on bees, cherry blossoms, and machines describes the way time, whether a single day or centuries, unfolds with a seeming and haunting inevitability. In the other, a grandmother loses her ability to speak after a stroke. 

The children have chosen the word: apricot 

From the big envelope. They are writing sestinas. Now the word: burn. 

They squirm in their seats for the next word. 

Grandma Edith stirs the jam with a wooden spoon. 

Next, they choose gate. 

The thick smell of fruit brings back her ghost.

I’ll let future readers imagine how the author successfully sustains six, six-line stanzas always ending with those six alternating words (apricot, burn, word, spoon, gate, ghost) and then unites them in her delightfully satisfying envoi. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book. 

I take the poems in this section to mean that ancestry and progeny are, themselves, a “two-way radio.” We inherit place, time, tradition, and filial relationships, but we also conjure them in turn through reception and ritual. “The Child is father of the Man,” wrote William Wordsworth in a patriarchal paradox that Clark would surely undo. Clark’s version might be something like this: only a daughter can make a grandmother of her mother. 

I have, of necessity, focused disproportionately on the first two sections of Clark’s book, in part to leave some of the jewels concealed. The thin hymns and psalms in section three talk directly to God, and honestly. “Can you hear me?” “Why would anyone / dare to be a simile for God?” Questions are the syntax of choice for both believers and doubters, as those from religious backgrounds know. Find reverence, “Is there an equal sign for deity?” and accusation: “God, if both of us are lost, / which one of us will lead?” As faith and knowledge mature, “What can I believe now?” Soon, “Heaven is half a memory / from a Sunday School lesson.” These inquiries are enriched by poems in the second section, ones that I haven’t had time to gloss, about Utah, Mormon family history, polygamy, and more. 

Clark moves from certainty or binary toward multiplicity. Notice the shift away from questions: “Instead of one answer, I want many.” Instead of a thin hymn, “This wild hymn.” Faith becomes simple again: “All it takes is a slight movement of air / to bring me to my knees / as though someone is listening.” Clark has made a heaven, in and on her own terms, out of this mud-brown Earth. The voice that wanted a future early in the book continues to hope for something after death near its end: 

    when I take my last breath

    I want a shore to be there, a slap of water

    against my boat, relief as tender

    as my grandmother’s hands.

Even if the speaker promised “I won’t go to heaven” at the beginning of the collection, the concluding image is a welcoming one. “If there is a gate into that sun, let my grandmother guard it.” 

Isaac James Richards is a PhD student at the Pennsylvania State University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aethlon, Blue Heron Review, Christianity & Literature, and elsewhere. Find him online at IsaacRichards.com.

 

Monster Galaxy

by Cindy Veach

(MoonPath Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Carla Panciera

 

Cindy Veach’s newest book, Monster Galaxy, is her most intimate collection to date. It reads like a memoir while making the personal archetypal. It allows for the intimate details of one life to reveal the universal and it reminds us that memories and experiences may individuate us, but they do not make us other.

Veach employs a personal speaker who not only assesses the present, but who also looks back on her past. In fact, the book is organized around the idea of before and after. Before and after the loss of loved ones, or becoming a mother, or historical events like the Challenger explosion or the Summer of Love, and absolutely before the fall of innocence and the startling realizations of adulthood. 

The “before” poems include a life lived watching “Lost in Space,” eating bologna sandwiches, worshipping Twiggy, singing pop tunes into a hairbrush. The poems are time capsules, rich with specific details that evoke an era. Veach’s speaker confesses, “What I remember is never what others remember,” a line that echoes Joan Didion who wrote that her family would come across a detail in her work and tell her it simply wasn’t true. “Very likely they are right,” Didion concurred, “for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” What Veach and Didion also share is the ability to make their readers believe their version of the truth. 

The purpose for Veach seems to be to create a world that is full of monsters more recognizable than those in horror films. The opening poem, “A Partial Catalog of My Monsters,” lists such villains as dementia, shame, and aging. Most surprising, and the creature whose haunting is a motif in this book, is The Good Girl: “She’s huge like a dirigible, huge / like the Jolly Green Giant. She can’t pick up a pin, /  can’t make a move without wrecking her house.” This poem also illustrates the poet’s ability to deliver the shared history of myth and then to remind us this is an individual’s journey as well, one that both includes us and focuses with pinpoint precision on an actual person: “One [monster] is Forgetting, the other Remembering // she was a girl waving to her father leaving on a trip / his promise to bring her back little hotel soaps.”

Childhood here is “negotiated” by a girl who confesses at her own birthday party that, “I want to disappear // and be the center of attention.” Even her earliest memories cast her as observer, a child destined to become a poet. What she reveals at times is cinematic, a vividly reconstructed stage set of an era where a father moonlights at the Union Leader as he studies for his BA while “Mom picks the meat / off chicken necks for supper.” 

Veach writes from the after, of course, a place where her father has recently died, where her brother has also died, and where dementia claims her mother. Grief is omnipresent, an invitation to look back and reexamine one’s past and then a reminder of how memory, despite its clarity, recedes and leaves one abandoned in a scene. In “Self-Portrait as Daytime Television,” she writes: 

    It’s like the days sped away and now here I am

    left with the memory of Moriticia Addams twirling her long black tresses.

    It’s as if I lost my baby brother

    the day he toddled into the bees nest and not years later

    after a hundred benders ruined his heart. 

Time is far from linear, these lines remind us. We can’t separate the decades, the moments, even the specific images of one day in the life from all the days that preceded it and that follow.

If the book is part bildungsroman, then the protagonist’s arc hinges perfectly on the poem, “Some Things I Never Told Anyone,” a masterful culmination of the good girl assuming guilt for others’ actions on a family trip to London, and the person she will become: a woman subject to the knife-edge of experience, who sees and feels things so viscerally she has no choice but to try to contain the monsters. Her choice, inevitably, is to confine them to the page. The vacation begins with her insistence on riding a rollercoaster despite her parents’ hesitation, includes her father losing his camera on the Tube and lashing out at his family, and culminates in the speaker toting board games from the car to the hotel room and opening the wrong door where she disturbs a couple having sex. 

    The woman looked right at me

    all those game boxes

    Chutes and Ladders Candy Land Life

    each sharp edge marking

    the tender insides of my forearms.

Veach’s poems are connected stylistically via the repetition of lines and images, and thematically by the idea of loss. The book is part elegy, not only for those people she has lost, but also for the places and images of the past. Grief fragments us, but words, like the gravity that connects the stars, planets, gasses, and dust that make up galaxies, connect thoughts and allow one to move forward, even to see some beauty and some mystery in the world. The speaker says, of her father, “He taught / me falling stars aren’t stars but tiny cosmic rocks burning / up as they hit our atmosphere.” The combination of facts and story, what is real and what is imagined, is omnipresent in Veach’s work.

Ultimately, she does get to say goodbye to her father, one important step towards healing. She learns to accept things about herself even if they aren’t what she might have wished for. She’ll never be shameless, for example; she comes to terms with her invisibility. But ultimately, she steps into her own version of power. Birds, she remembers, came from monsters, but they sing. She celebrates the magic of giving birth to her children. In “Resolution,” she resolves “to find joy in photos of winter / jasmine,” to “take pride in the soup / I made last night. Spicy and flush with shrimp—” and admits, “ I am still blooming.” 

The good girl has become a woman who defies the label of crone, who defies any definition but those she gives herself. Finally, in “Woman Who Swallowed a Python, she writes: “Is there a woman inside every monster or monsters /  inside every woman? What if both things can be true. / A reticulation of wrinkles and collagen, wisdom / and faux pas, fear and ferocity.”

Joan Didion defended keeping a journal this way: “Remember what it felt like to be me: that is always the point.” Cindy Veach’s speaker asserts her unique voice and her sharply examined idiosyncracies, but she also reminds us of the ways in which we are not so different after all. 

Carla Panciera’s collection Bewildered received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. Her poetry collections include: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press), No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera), and One Trail of Longing, Another of String (Bordighera, November 2025). She is also the author of Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press). The recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Grant in creative nonfiction, Carla is a recently retired high school English teacher from the North Shore of Massachusetts.