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.
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