Rough Sea

by J.P. White

(Grayson Books, 2025) 

Reviewed by Erica Gross

J.P. White’s latest collection, Rough Sea, takes us on a cruise with a wise and erudite guide, one who transforms observations of sights along the way, whether otters cavorting on a log, a riverside homeless encampment, or the antics of ravens beside a “growling sea” into a series of vivid and deeply personal poems. White illuminates the world around us, focusing on humans’ impact on the environment, the joys of a love found later in life, and how the intelligence of Nature rivals that of our own. 

Rough Sea resounds with precision, as in “Canoe,” the collection’s opening poem:

I get one more day in September on the fringe

of change and there near the bank, four otters

recline on a log to crack a stash of mussels.

I settle into their savoring without thinking

I should be elsewhere.

The serenity of this moment includes a hard-won, bittersweet insight: “This river light, where otters chirp and bob / and share the feast, must go on without us.” 

White’s awareness of how quickly time passes underscores many of these poems. “Greed” juxtaposes his perception of diminishing expectations with the wonder of a new love. Myriad, unaccountable steps were needed until the connection between the two lovers finally occurred: “I must not have been ready to meet you until I did.” The poem describes their parallel paths: "Then again, how close we were, always, / just missing each other in the same towns, / once living on the same street within a shout."

Eventually, in that mysterious way we can’t quite comprehend, those paths overlap. “If God had told me I had to go back to find you / in some early assignation, I wouldn’t object to the slowness / of looking more keenly at every passing face.” The less time they have together, the more precious it is: "because you are the one I had always imagined / would bring out my greed for more waking hours."

“Regarding Those Lovers Who Meet Late in Life” depicts a less romantic view, to say the least, of such a relationship. “Let us call them two lions circling a kill,” the poem begins, “What lies dead between them is everything.” The partners consider each other’s emotional baggage, as onlookers “watch with wonder and horror.” After enough time, however, their defenses erode: “happily and slowly, they will drink of this.” The poem ends on a hopeful note: "Imagine, from such an encounter, / order will return to the entire kingdom."

White’s poems focus on animals, who appear in alternately wise and hilarious guises. “The Ravens of Mendocino” are “steadier than onions in the ground,” “smart, fearless, faithful to a fault.” In other words, these birds are endowed with qualities we humans value but too often fail to achieve. In “Another Moment,” a small, wild creature inhabits “that corduroy road,” “unsheltered and / ungathered,” living her life on her own terms. And in “Heaven is a Pig at the Fence,” the speaker extolls the virtues of having a pig as a companion: "The world is evermore a sullen face and as you get older / it will see you less, but the pig will always take a gander / and talk freely about this and that."

Immune to the judgements of people, the speaker reminds us, the fact that an animal tolerates our presence is its own reward: “this one piebald pig / with no quit in her for who I am, how I got here, my new limp.” 

Place is key to Rough Sea, and White finds inspiration in unlikely spots. “In a Sea of Trucks” describes a liminal, unnerving location—the vast highway system of America. The countryside, paved and subdued, is forced to accommodate this conduit for consumer spending, the engine that runs our economy: "It doesn’t much matter where you are in Nebraska, Indiana, / North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, West Virginia, / once you enter the shipping lane of the American interstate."

Those trucks carry a mind-boggling array of goods: “petroleum and pigs, Fed-X and concrete mixers, / milk and cheese, toiletries, tropical fish, bass boats, / fresh cut flowers, a tank of egg yolks and Red Bull concentrate.” What does this motley collection of merchandise reveal about the desires and dreams of the people who will, at some point, make use of it? Are these items, delivered across thousands of miles, really necessary? The poem asks us to contemplate what would happen if the trucks simply stopped running.

In addition to delivering physical items, these trucks create an uncomfortable, often dangerous environment. White aptly expresses the disorienting experience of driving those slick roads, sandwiched between “semis, one behind the other, / an armada balling hard behind tinted glass [...] / I don’t want to buy another thing / that’s been diesel-tracked across the country.”  

Two poems, “White Nights” and “Long Ago at Lenin’s Tomb,” connect a very different place—Russia—with White’s daughter, whom he adopted from that country. “White Nights” depicts a visit to Russia with his daughter, presumably to show her where she was born and foster a connection with her native culture. The daughter, however, fails to find an affinity for this land she can’t remember: “You see we were there with our adopted daughter / on an in-country tour she never warmed to [...] / She thought her birth country a mistake [...] / Everything confused her.” What she sees exposes a place that seems baffling and threatening: “The night that is the never-ending day,” “How in every village, chickens and goats in a brawl,” “bread lines held by the old ones who never smile.”

“Long Ago at Lenin’s Tomb” opens with another memory of lines:

    The potato and mushroom and garlic line.

    The bread and vodka line.

    The line to stand in to get papers stamped

    to bring home a daughter from an orphanage.

This visit to Russia recalls a time that seems, on reflection, more innocent than the version we see in “White Nights:” “Russia had not yet invaded Afghanistan. / It seemed as if this was a time when war was not / the only ragged coat that could be worn.” The poem ends with a scene of two girls playing with a hula hoop, a foreshadowing of the child he came here to claim.

Athletic and direct, the poems of Rough Sea make the most of diminishing resources. J.P. White reminds us to slow down and appreciate the many moments that make up a life. As he writes in “Morning Miracle,” one of the book’s last poems, “that ending / could be the last beautiful surprise.”

Erica Goss is the author of Landscape with Womb and Paradox, forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2025, and Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, The Indianapolis Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, West Trestle, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013–2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes, and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

Auscultate

by Clayton Adam Clark

(Galileo Books, 2025) 

Reviewed by Jennifer Keith

Despite religious dogma to the contrary, Homo sapiens is a bloody punctuation mark at the end of the last word in the last sentence in the last paragraph on the last page in the last volume of the planet’s mega-Brittanica biography. With our impact on the planet, we may have already overstayed our welcome. The truth of humans as an ephemeral, invasive species is all over Clayton Adam Clark’s Auscultate, a collection of 38 poems from Galileo Press.  

The title refers to the act of listening to the heart with a stethoscope, an intimate diagnostic exercise that involves both touch and hearing. The imperative form is an invitation, or perhaps an order. Though hearts can signal sentiment, the heart of this book, arranged in four “chambers,” is anatomic, not emoji. Clark’s use of Latin and medical terms create a useful distance. While Auscultate offers glimpses of deep personal pain (the death of a friend’s mother inspires a number of poems, including the title piece), the book doesn’t ugly-cry.

The heart has two ventricles and two atria, and Clark’s poems are full of bifurcations, especially the dichotomy in choosing one impulse over another. Clark is deft at showing how those fateful binary decisions reverberate in other lives—or literally end them—for humans and other life forms. 

Those other life forms, Clark’s poems remind us, insist on taking up physical space. Encounters with nature become crises, hinges between brutality and mercy. Humans strike back at other species with pitchforks, tennis rackets, and neurotoxins or crush them against white drywall. Even a moment of pity for a worm besieged by ants in “Firebreak” is literally poisoned. In “Mousing,” compassion degrades into a practical numbness—having a heart is hard when modern life’s distractions are so ready to relieve you of the task. 

Speeding motor vehicles (“glass-and-metal crypt[s]”) compress time and force disastrous decisions by humans and other species. In “The Missouri,” a car-crash survivor makes a split-second choice between two fates and in “Flight Theory,” Clark’s driver is recalibrating fight or flight impulses in himself facing a charging dog while acknowledging the mutilation of a deer by a charging automobile.

    […] But you’re still

    surprised how far you must drive

    to find the roughed-up pieces

    and the head upturned on

    the shoulder, as if it never saw

    anything but ahead, or even if

    you can find time for second thought,

    you haven’t the space for change.

The driver in “Attrition” slows down on the road to his mother’s house so that if a deer must die, it won’t be by his car. But another driver doesn’t: "someone who still needs / the yellow sign with a bounding cartoon / buck to perceive their hazard."

 

Technically, the poems are heterogenous. Clark leans into iambic lilt and full-blown sonnet form on occasion, but it’s clear he lets each piece be what it wants. Both his free-verse and formal poems feel natural. He’s not shoe-horning his meanings into form in poems such as “Caprinae,” (a stealthy sonnet), “Figure II,” and others. 

Likewise, Clark’s free verse mostly avoids deconstructing for the hell of it, even if, in spots, the abstraction feels a little forced, such as in “Sleepwalk Mannerisms.” He’s taking cues from Francis Bacon, the subject of several of the ekphrastic poems in Auscultate. Clark’s visions of Earth’s human occupation, in all its meaty grotesquery, are dashed out on the page with the color and energy of Bacon’s expressionism.  

Physically, the book is curious. The cover art is colorful and oddly cheery, while the back cover includes a quote that hints what kind of “heart” is explored within. But there aren’t any blurbs, which is surprising. Most of the comprising poems have been published in journals and it is hard to imagine Clark’s work evading the eye of accomplished poets, whose words on the back cover could help get the book into more hands. 

In auscultation, the part of the stethoscope that touches the skin and transmits the sound is called the bell. The poems of Auscultate reverberate, toll, and warn. What flows through the book’s four chambers is warm, sticky—here: fire-bright with oxygen; there: dusky and choked dark without; everywhere: an indelible, brilliant stain.

Jennifer Keith’s poems and reviews have appeared in Sewanee Review, Able Muse, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Best American Poetry 2015, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist in the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. A chapbook, Truant Season, came out on Apathy Press Poets in 2022, and her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, was chosen by David Yezzi for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Laughing in Yiddish

by Jamie Wendt

(Broadstone Books, 2025) 

Reviewed by Rebecca Ellis

Laughing in Yiddish, the second poetry collection by Jamie Wendt, brings an entire world of immigrant history vividly to life. Wendt uses sure-footed lyricism and deeply evocative imagery to tell the story of Jews living in a vibrant Russian shtetl, enduring pogroms and massacres and finally escaping to a new life in Chicago. She gives us, generously, the very real stories of street peddlers, grandparents, and great-grandparents, the sounds of early Chicago, the urban renewal that remade Chicago, and through it all the people finding strength through tradition and memory to make a new life after loss.  

Wendt uses a variety of formal and informal poetic forms to carry contemporary and historical voices, threading together the present and its past. The poems take risks, using ekphrastic poems, ghazals, pantoums, an ode, and even a triolet to build a nuanced and compelling history. They navigate that history from women working in a cigarette factory or at a spinning wheel, to the pogroms and massacres that the poet’s own ancestors survived in Lithuania, to a contemporary mother interrogating the past in order to build a world for her children. 

The opening poem in this collection, “The Guests,” brings ancestors into the present, giving them like a gift to her children, moving simultaneously “toward the past and into the present” within the context of the Jewish celebration of Sukkot. The poem sets the stage for the entire book, everything framed in preserving people and tradition, and doing it in a frame of richly rendered and memorable poetry.

In the poem that gives the book its title, “Laughing in Yiddish,” the difficulty of leaving one place and going to another, without losing the past, is seen through the eyes of a recent immigrant:

    Other women trained themselves not to follow 

    Lot’s wife’s gaze, not to look back at destruction.

    Why witness the mass of corpses again

    and the remains of a lost world? I tried leaving behind 

    the tall wooden shul, tried not to look back at burning cypress.

    I tried laughing in Yiddish in Chicago.

She gives equally convincing voice to the city itself as it changes under her feet. In “The Eisenhower Expressway Speaks, 1951” the highway tells its own story of coming to life, and how it remakes the city:

    Boys wrestle in the pit

    of me, a playlot 

    after their playground is torn down. 

    Journalists call them morons,

    vandals, and hoodlums, but I like

    their company,…

    After summer storms,

    I turn into a brown river.

    Boys bring rafts,

    float through my stalled construction

    like a vacation cruise. 

After that initial phase of construction, witnessed by the boys, the city, and again the boys, all feel the impact. The moving of a cemetery to make way for the highway is told in visceral, unforgettable detail, even to the highway’s final point of rest:

    The Near West Side sweeps 

    its sidewalks free of otherness

    for me. Free of poor immigrants

    and exiled refugees

    who move North or farther West

    when I intrude, slam the landscape,

    so deafening, so white handed.

    As crews shovel, they excavate and lift

    dead bodies from under my skin.

    I pause patiently, partly severed

    as a cemetery relocates 

    for me. Then workers lie me back down, 

    smooth me out for miles

    with shattered family fortunes 

    directed elsewhere. 

    After the next storm,

    I cough up bones 

    and the boys play

    fetch like dogs. 

The historical depth and range of these poems is riveting. As the woman narrator in “Laughing in Yiddish” shows, the past and present exist in the same layer, informing each other. Personal histories that have been lost, or only partially told, or suppressed are brought into the present with precise language and immediacy. 

Form and language reinforce each other—a poem about the emptying of Jews from a Russian village is told from the viewpoint of the children and in the form of a triolet, providing a chilling contrast. In another poem, about a 1903 massacre in Kishinev, the lines are laid down straight, spaced evenly, resolute, just like the person doing the work of lining up the bodies described. Here is the opening of “Someone Had to Line Up the Bodies:" ”someone had to line up the bodies // connect shadow to shoulder to shadow // patterns of devastation for the photographer."

The massacres included in these poems are not just historical backdrop for the people in the poems. They are personal fodder for the poet’s own experience of family and self; the tragedies are interrogated and kept under a light in order to inform the present. The poem “Kuziai Forest, Lithuania, June 29, 1941” begins:

    Where death is 

    quick, there is

    little story. Pit

    by victim shovels.

    Dig your own.

    700 Jews

    facing the firing

    squad, a mass

    grave, easy to miss,

The poem reveals, in a way that reports or even photographs after the fact could not, the simple courageous acts taken to preserve and protect a sense of self.

    far from a forest cry, 

    a ring of shots, 

    tree rings,

    wedding rings

    swallowed 

    when the time came.

And those acts come forward in history to sit with the poet, informing the act of remembering, and of perhaps creating a poem about it all. 

    Sit under a blood

    tree with poems

    on a nice breezy day

    and not even know.

    Not even know how to 

    have a last thought.

Even carrying that heavy history, the poems propel the reader forward. The easy mastery of form shows in the ekphrastic poems (from paintings by Marc Chagall to woodcuts by Todros Geller), the skillful use of repetitive forms such as the pantoum and ghazal and triolet. This sense of craft shows even in the subtle but very precise selection of language. In “Interview with Papa: The Miscarriage,” an intimate re-imagining of a miscarriage, note the word "corse," which carries both the sound and sense of "coarse" and the literal meaning, archaically, of "corpse." This careful tension with craft and language lifts the tragedy within the poem.

    They were not supposed to talk about it.

    No one did. 

    So, I fill in the blanks— 

            In 1961, in the large bathroom 

            in the house her husband built,

            a young blond woman bends  

            over thick corse blood.

            Two toddler girls scratch at the door, Mommy?

            Or maybe the girls play with paper dolls down the hall.

            Maybe no one else is home. 

            Maybe the mail carrier drops letters onto the mat

            while her body cramps, 

            pulses outward. Little

            slippery thing. 

In the final poem, Wendt comes full circle from her opening poem, again tying generations together. Remembering another grandparent, she writes, "I will record your voice here. // I will keep you. Let me tell you a story." And she does. Reading this collection, I felt a little bit like that Chicago expressway under construction, lifted up in order to look—really look—at every unique life that had been in that path, and laid back down, gently, my mind lit up with the histories, and singing with their language and images. 

Rebecca Ellis lives in southern Illinois. Her poems can be found in About Place Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, Bellevue Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx Journal, and Crab Creek Review. She edited Cherry Pie Press, for 10 years publishing poetry chapbooks by Midwestern women poets.

 

Helen of Troy, 1993

by Maria Zoccola

(Scribner, 2025) 

Reviewed by Katherine Indermaur

In Maria Zoccola’s debut collection, Helen of Greek mythological infamy is recast in the humid glow of rural Tennessee. Caught in 1993 between second- and third-wave feminism, this titular Helen of Troy charges in with a caustic, hilarious, and unmistakable voice dynamic enough to drive the entire book. Watching Jurassic Park, she rhapsodizes:

    i was cheering that damn

    lizard on while it chased down all those folks with their

    miserable problems and unhappinesses and inane little 

    cruelties shared over the dinner table like it’s amazing how

    you spent thirty dollars on blue jeans instead of getting 

    the vacuum fixed it stomped them flat like good night like

    sweet dreams and sayonara 

These persona poems encompass the story of a woman reinventing herself through Zoccola’s reinvention of classic myth, reminiscent of other mythological contemporizing by women like Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale, Anne Carson’s canonical Autobiography of Red or even Madeline Miller’s bestselling novels Circe and The Song of Achilles.

Myths give us approachable ways into our culture’s narratives and the narratives of our time. As Roberto Colasso wrote in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, “Myths are beautiful muddles and wonderful mirrors in the tangled funhouse of literature where we might glimpse ourselves once more, again and again.” Because we use myths to continually glimpse ourselves, to remake mythological figures as Zoccola does in Helen of Troy, 1993 is to layer and entangle personal endeavors of meaning-making with the broader arc of storytelling that is human history, and women’s place in it. 

Traditionally, Helen of Troy is a tragic and hapless figure. In the myth’s prevailing version, the Trojan War begins when Helen—the most beautiful woman in the world—is abducted from her home and husband in Sparta and taken to marry the Trojan prince Paris. The tragedy does not begin there, however. Helen is conceived when Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, takes on the form of a swan to rape human Leda (famously depicted in Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan”). Greek myth is full of women like Leda and Helen, pawns in the games of men and gods. In the 2024 New York Times article “The Women of Greek Myths Are Finally Talking Back,” Alexandra Alter writes, “Female characters [of Greek mythology] have either been relegated to the fringes, or filtered through the male gaze, depicted as helpless victims, sexual objects, and war prizes. … it makes sense that women are excavating ancient stories and giving new life to female characters whose perspectives have been elided.” Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 is an assertive part of this movement to vocalize and introduce new agency to these ancient female figures, though it does not require previous knowledge about Greek myth to enjoy the contemporary narrative it presents. 

The best way to introduce the book’s humorous and personable approach might simply be with a litany of its titles: “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine,” “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings,” “helen of troy avoids her school reunion,” “helen of troy cranks the volume on ‘like a prayer’ in the ballet studio parking lot,” “helen of troy runs the station wagon into a ditch,” and “helen of troy reigns over chuck e. cheese,” among others. This tremendous and entertaining debut manages both erudition and approachable ingenuity across its 68 pages.

Amid its Southern setting, Helen of Troy, 1993 triumphantly sings with warmth and wit. Here rural Appalachia is smothering, inescapable—much like the old plot points of myth. In “helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu,” Zoccola writes:

    i walked out into the mass of it, boots

    to my knees against the coiled mines

    of copperheads, my mother behind me,

    watching the sky for a white spread

    of wings. i grew my whole life in a house

    death longed to touch with one soft finger,

    and when i looked out at the building wave,

    i thought, do it.

Here Zoccola complicates the assumption that the women of Greek mythology were helpless or uninteresting simply because things kept happening to them: they got married off, they got raped, they got pregnant, they got murdered. This Helen has a dynamic relationship with fate—do it, she dares. It is less what happens to Zoccola’s Helen that makes her interesting—a lackluster affair that ends in a Perkins restaurant, a daughter’s friend’s birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese—and more her own psychic vitality.

Helen of Troy, 1993 insists on the storytelling of the overlooked. In the book’s opening poem, “helen of troy feuds with the neighborhood,” helen declares—no, demands—“i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.” The book’s most enchanting passages run away with the ecstasy of their own Southern song to further demand such listening. “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly” croons:

         

         … beloved land of madonna on the speakers. country

    of women with cursive lists. everyone i’ve ever known nurses

    their children from these shelves, pushing loads of accreting weight,

    everyone i’ve yet to meet. i high-step through the aisles,

    nursemaid to bread loaves, coupons purse-holstered and waiting.

    sing, muse, of the manager’s special, two-for-one on yogurt cups…

This synthesis of highfalutin ode with the Piggly Wiggly-quotidian produces not only the pleasure of surprise, but the joyous realization that good storytelling is less a product of plot than of voice. Zoccola’s Helen emanates an insistent joie de vivre that churns right on through the plot of her life, no matter how uninspiring it may at first glance appear. 

The book not only gives voice to Helen, but to the women of the neighborhood in a Greek chorus-esque crown of sonnets interspersed throughout. These poems color in the landscape around a fictional Sparta, Tennessee, and provide some of the context for the greater story at work in Helen’s family. In “the spartan women discuss helen of troy,” the collective explains, “a girl was born who was not a swan. / thick-boned, earth-bound, she looked every minute / over her shoulder for the real life / she was promised, but her neck was too short / and she could not see it.” Though Helen could not see it, the reader now can.

Throughout the collection, Helen wrestles with this lack of control she, a nineties suburban American housewife, has over the trajectory of her life. See the unwieldy nature of “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings”: 

    bags of gummy sharks. ice cream, like a lot of ice cream,

    cartons of fudge ripple i pound in one sitting

    with a spoon like a dirt mover, scoop scoop

    down the hole, layers of white ounces plugged

    right into the skin, who was that one wizard in salem

    they squashed to death in a tofu press,

    giles somebody, they just kept piling it on,

    and that sucker smiled his bluebird smile

    and asked for more. cheesecake. jelly rolls.

Even the direction of the poem’s garrulousness seems to ultimately slither out of Helen’s grasp. There is reason to rejoice for this slipperiness, though. How else would we get to “that one wizard in salem” and the other figures populating Helen’s inner life? How else would we relinquish, finally, our own desires and simply “listen”?

Helen of Troy, 1993 is a disarming and marvelous book for every kind of reader, from Greek mythophile to those of us looking for a laugh. Zoccola’s poetry renders a joyride of a character out of an old myth and, like the joyride Helen takes just before wrecking the family station wagon, “why shouldn’t your toes itch / on that pedal so sweet / and easy you might as well / be that sugar from the movies?” Have fun reading about one of the world’s great tragedies? Per the dare Helen herself makes, do it. 

Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Book Award, and two chapbooks. She is an editor for Sugar House Review and the recipient of prizes from Black Warrior Review and the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has appeared in Ecotone, Electric Literature, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, TIMBER, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Besaydoo

by Yalie Saweda Kamara

(Milkweed Editions, 2024) 

Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

You know that delicious shock when sounds you can almost understand suddenly transform into words? Like when you realize “Besaydoo” means “Be safe dude.” We discover this, as does the speaker’s mother, in the title poem of Yalie Saweda Kamara’s award-winning first book. The speaker and her mother then adopt this phrase as their mantra: “Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like / some word from deep in somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we / saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous sun. Besaydoo.” Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer and a native of Oakland, California. In a wide range of poetic forms, she explores the ruinous and tender.

This book is wider and taller than average. It has to be. Kamara’s line lengths range from the five-syllable lines of haiku to lines that reach 33 syllables. The ten-page poem “Aunty X Becomes a Unit of Light,” begins “While looking in the mirror, my Aunty X surveys her head, wondering if her alopecia has been a / lifelong exercise in losing parts of herself,” a line that spans the entire page, and a sentence that goes even longer. These long lines appear both in poems that have the feel and shape of a lyric essay, as well as those where the line length ranges wildly between, and within, stanzas. 

The long line length lets Kamara set a conversational tone and teaches us to read as we might a narrative, paying attention to character, setting, and plot development. Her shorter lines serve in a different way. In “A Poem for my Uncle,” she writes:

My uncle came back from the dead the color of

    a strobe light, float-walked above

    the church’s maroon carpet pressing

    into the pulse of every living thing in the sanctuary.

Ending a line “the color of” heightens anticipation. The color of what? And we have to wait for the answer. Putting “a strobe light, float-walked above” as its own line multiplies meanings: both the uncle (as part of the sentence) and the strobe light (from the stand-alone line) get to float-walk. And the short lines slow the reader down and ask them to focus on the imagery, the sounds (pressing, pulse) as well as the overall meaning of the sentence. In her wide-ranging use of lines, it’s like Kamara is saying, “Every tool in the poetry toolbox is mine to use, and I will use it how I want.” 

Uncles, aunts, a brother, a mother—family, who have come from Sierra Leone and must engage with cultural shifts, form a central theme in this book. We hear odes to lumpia and stories of eating malombo fruit in Freetown, but this book also takes place in the racism of America. In “I Ask My Brother Jonathan to Write about Oakland, and He Describes His Room,” we learn of a brother who hugs his own flesh [so] the “X his arms make across his chest is not mistaken for a target.” Unlike how popular culture often depict Black men, Kamara shows us loved ones who are real and vulnerable. And also unlike much of popular culture, she does not shy away from the specificity of racism in America. She includes a series of poems about the Nia Wilson memorial, and in “Bloomington, Indiana Part I” she writes:

What I knew, but did not want to know, was that a friend was called a monkey and spat on around the corner from my apartment. What I remembered, but did not want to remember, was the car with the tinted windows that once followed me for blocks. What I recall, but want to forget, is why we never stop for gas in Martinsville.

The equivocating “what I knew, but did not want to know” gives these images a terrible poignancy, makes the speaker’s witness more real, vivid, and hard-hitting. 

She witnesses violence, racism, and resistance. When the Black football player Marshawn Lynch refused to answer reporters’ questions, Kamara understands this moment as a thrilling refusal to capitulate: “I too have wanted to become a miracle / in my own Black mouth.” This book is filled with the miracles of Black resistance and joy starting from the first poem “Oakland as Home, Home as Myth.” It includes a repeated monostich line “Oakland is a killing field, they say” a terrifying drone that we are taught to consider suspect by the “they say.” The speaker and her community don’t feel this way about Oakland—outsiders do. Kamara contrasts that disparagement of her home with lines of sensory delight and celebration:

               The upper level of the MacArthur BART Station

    smells like Palmer’s Cocoa Butter because being ashy in The Town

    is worse than jaywalking. The aroma of chocolate blankets the opposing

    platforms, while warm air kisses bare ankles and calves

Here is a magical world where the very air smells delicious because of how the people care for themselves. In “Sweet Baby Fabulist,” Kamara tells us a three-year-old nephew calls everything Black: 

               Black is what he called the universe,

    to show us how much he loved her. Black 

    were the rainbows, the full moon and the deep nightfall.

    Black were the rivers and sky. God was as Black

    as the autumn breeze’s call. 

This child sees a Black universe full of love and beauty. The syntax of “Black were” combined with the repetition and rhymes (nightfall, call) make the poem sing like a lullaby. With these techniques, the poem becomes both a witness to Black joy and a promise to protect those who can see the world this way.

Throughout the book, this is a promise we hear a speaker making to herself. Several poems refer to getting sober, deleting Tinder, moving away from the worst of Midwestern racism because those patterns and places keep her from Black joy. In “Elegy for My Two Step” she tells us:

    Before the spirits left me, I used to sway

    with some sort of lubricated ease inside

    a dingy crescent of bodies that reeked of

    2$ Dickel shots and buzzed with Tinder

    pheromones.

The “dingy crescent” of this old life contrasts with the full moon the child sees. The poem ends, “I touch my blessed, undying self.” She has rebuilt herself. “Besaydoo,” the saying, means the community is watching out for you. Besaydoo, the book, celebrates the importance of that community but also shows a speaker bringing herself healing and joy. 

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, and Grist, among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Waste Management Facility

by Scott Withiam

(MadHat Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Carla Panciera

In a waste management facility, waste products are altered chemically, physically, and biologically for a variety of reasons. Scott Withiam does the same for the ordinary world around us in his latest collection (his third). Nothing ends up as it begins, resisting the usual predictions, long held notions, and plain logic. The result is an imaginative and singular adventure through a world we thought we knew.

 

The early pages of the book seem anchored enough in reality. The opening section focuses on the rustic landscape of a childhood spent “speeding across corn flats to the lake,” driving deer for hunters with a friend, and recalling the taste of a grandfather’s homemade pickles. But even the first poem, “Draft”, establishes the idea of an imbalance that is alluring and poses an important question. The speaker’s grandmother scales a wall at an overlook and leans into winds, imploring him to join her. “She kept telling me to step up, look, / but I covered my face,” he says, perhaps referring to the present danger or to some version of his own future in which, he too, will either be forced to let go, eschew sense, or continue to observe the world from a safe distance. Which, one wonders, would be preferable?

 

The question is perhaps answered in “Men’s Room” where a lone gas station attendant behind glass one night is a reminder of  “unattended / animals . . . in a failed zoo, catatonic, / rubbing the same spot in a chain-link fence.” There are many ways to exist within the spectrum of balancing on the edge of violence to being stifled in a literal cage. 

 

In “One Man Show” the speaker views paintings of familiar landscapes that capture grief, but he claims he is “not interested in any artist’s abstractions.” Rather, he longs to be grounded in the what is, to remain far from the ledge, perhaps the antithesis to poetry and certainly to many of the poems that follow. Here is how we manage, these first poems seem to say: Children navigate the fraught relationships of adults, adults reconcile painful aspects of their own pasts, all of us process grief.

Despite our attempts to tread carefully, it is impossible to ignore what threatens our peace, even when it happens offstage. In the poem “Hard Candy,” a young boy is admonished by an older person not to choke on a treat. While the warning is generic enough, actions outside the stuffy parlor where “three clocks ticking . . . / chased each other. One just had to take / the lead” is a scene that increasingly portends violence. Here and elsewhere, the poet bears witness to the small dramas of relationships and the larger social issues of migrant workers, failing farms, and boarded up factories, far from any abstract concepts of reality. If only we could exist in the world without internalizing its images, we wouldn’t need any alterations in what we find. 

 

Instead, we embark on an experience that is anything but a preservation of realism. People strolling along a beach are “bugs on a jawbone . . . pill bugs topside and topsy-turvy.” When breakfast with an old friend becomes tense, one man imagines himself as a chief petty officer on the eighteenth century New England streets full of “coopers, cordwainers, and shipwrights.” Another poem’s speaker imagines a discussion between the lovers where the woman becomes “as tight-lipped as a mollusk” and the man wonders, “And what did that make me? A greasy dumpster raccoon / feeling around for a clam underwater.” 

 

The heart of the book centers around lessons learned from the speaker’s job at a waste treatment plant: look busy, keep out of trouble, and observe the world through a clear lens that often relies on humor and the ability to manipulate language—the perfect internship for a young poet: 

 

As for feeling bad about being paid to

or about being removed from view

or about cheating taxpayers

or wrestling with the value

of a hard day's work or complicity,

I’m sorry, none of those concerns surfaced. 

 

The young man’s candor and his acceptance of his role matures into a realization that what keeps people most busy is avoiding solutions. Kids convince themselves they can’t learn algebra. Teachers can’t control the chaos in the cafeteria. Scientists can’t determine what has killed the birds they study. No one can slice a block of cheese with the proffered knife. When a former chemist flees his own country and ends up cleaning professors’ offices, his supervisor reminds him not to finish his day too early: “‘We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. Then what would there be?’”  The void, of course. Time to confront real questions. No wonder we spend so much of our lives engaged in the meaningless and make so little progress. The only employee who demonstrates any initiative in these poems is a blue jay (yes, the bird) who, fired from his job at a funeral home because he made a nest in the hair of the deceased, earns a new position as a concierge because the manager can’t imagine “who better to direct visitors to the most interesting places.” In Withiam’s world, this scenario is less ridiculous than reality. 

 

In these pages it is the non-poets who reach for creative expression—a brochure writer, the colleague trying to describe his golf swing, the woman who “had called curtains / of squalls giant jellyfishes, when a child / living on a high plateau.” By contrast, in “The Angry Estate Gardener,” the eulogists at a friend’s memorial service who are poets, lose their craft when they most need it. The speaker listens to their maddening chorus of platitudes. Meanwhile, he remembers the story his late friend told of the time he worked with a gardener who raised koi and banana trees to sell to the rich. The only marvel to a man wealthy enough to rent the trees for a party, is that they can stand on their own despite such shallow roots. “No one can stand on their own,” the friend offers, “covering, all at once, a lot of territory— from gardener to the great idea of global share so far from carried out, to poets—and right there was let go on the spot.” 

 

Withiam isn’t subject to treacle and sentimentality. He’s disgruntled, sarcastic, impatient with ornamentation. He’s very much part of the “real” world. (He reads People Magazine in doctors’ offices, pauses on his way to teach a class, surprised to hear an admissions tour guide using the fact that the school has Aaron Hernadez’s brain. “But where’s the heart?” he wonders?) But he is also capable of producing poems in which suitcases are interviewed by detectives, and a hibiscus, hybridized beyond all fragrance, dreams of hatching a mockingbird to once again distinguish itself. One of the final poems begins with a couple’s first promising night together and then veers into a dream world where manholes speak to the woman trying to escape her new lover, in part because he corrects her vocabulary. 

 

Even the sacred art of poetry itself can be reexamined through Withiam’s lens. In an attempt to win a poetry contest to make his mother proud before she dies, he is only partially successful. He wins, but is accompanied to the reception by his mother’s ghost who assures him “‘that poetry can transport anyone great distances.’” Instead of finding this inspiring, he is unable to write. Instead, he takes a job dressed as the Statue of Liberty, standing on a street corner and waving motorists into the parking lot of a tax preparation office. Solutions ahead!

 

In Waste Management Facility, Scott Withiam asks his readers what the grandmother in the first poem asked: Will you stand here on this ledge? As the wind howls and blows your coattails like sails, will you forego your safety net? Are you prepared to see what happens when, uncaged, unbound by logic, you, instead, trust in a balancing act between what is and what can be? The answer, of course, especially where these poems are concerned, is yes.

Carla Panciera’s newest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in numerous journals including Poetry, Nimrod, and the Los Angeles Review. Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. Her poetry collections are One of the Cimalores (Cider Press Review Award) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Prize). A third collection is forthcoming in November 2025 from Bordighera Press.

Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Winter 2024

Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney 

(Macmillan to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

Irish author and literary anti-hero Sally Rooney is out with her newest, Intermezzo. Rooney, ever an astute observer of the

human predicament, doesn’t disappoint in this novel about family, chess, and the gritty messiness of grief and forgiveness.

Her distinctive prose style rises to the level of poetry,

repeatedly, distinguishing her as a writer who constantly pushes the boundaries of her craft.

—Shari Zollinger

& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love

by aby kaupang 

(Parlor Press, 2023)

Lightning strikes a house amidst its residents’ profound grief, serving as both fire and aperture, this jolt giving way across

the book's expansive poem to “lightening” and “miracle & practice.” It is emblematic of the larger lyric project kaupang has built across multiple books over 15 years. Her poems are a navigation of grief’s potential to be both precise and all encompassing, but also a study of adaptation and love’s ability to suture home and body amidst loss.

—Michael McLane

What Small Sound

by Francesca Bell

(Red Hen Press, 2023)

Spending time with Francesca Bell’s collection, I understand what it must feel like to be ocean, reaching in for mouthfuls of shore, gorging on a surplus of sand like glass teeth, porcelain shells like splintered slivers of nail. Everything gritty. Everything sharp. Everything too much and yet, feeling like I couldn’t get enough. Bell’s poems hold nothing back, dealing honestly and poignantly with the intimacies of womanhood, motherhood, love, desire, and life’s many griefs. Hers is a book you will return to again and again.

—Samantha Samakande

Litany for the Long Moment

by Mary-Kim Arnold

(Essay Press, 2018)

This book-length lyric essay from a press known for excellent hybrid nonfiction investigates the nature of identity through

Arnold's history as a Korean-born American adoptee. Shaping the text are government questionnaires and other documents from the search for her Korean parents. Here the friction between the bureaucracy of selfhood and the individual spirit of selfhood reckons with a past dismantled by politics. 

—Katherine Indermaur

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing

by Adam Moss

(Penguin Press, 2024))

An insightful guide for multimodal writers, The Work of Art explores how ideas materialize into diverse aesthetic forms, offering practical strategies and reflections that resonate with those who blend text, visuals, audio, and more. Drawing on artist interviews and process artifacts, the book’s cross-disciplinary approach demystifies creativity, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in how varied modalities contribute to a cohesive, expressive work.

—Ben Gunsberg

Full Moon Coffee Shop

by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

(Ballantine Books, 2024)

If the idea of Brigadoon as a kind of pop-up (full moons only) cake shop in Japan, run by a tortoiseshell cat who reads the horoscope of people (a script writer and a TV exec) in need of the kind of guidance only a tortoiseshell might offer in the middle of the night sounds good, then this book is for you. Dreams within dreams. 

I’m on a Japanese-novelsin- translation binge lately, so I thought, “Why not?” I’m pleased I did.

—Neil Flatman