Quarantine Highway

by Millicent Borges Accardi 

(FlowerSong Press, 2022) 

Reviewed by David E. Poston

In her endnotes to Quarantine Highway, Millicent Borges Accardi explains that it was “written during early and mid-pandemic months,” often from the 30 by 30 writing challenge organized by Juan Morales for CantoMundo fellows. During that dark time, Accardi writes that poetry “drew us close, reunited our spirits and held our souls safely within our own and each other’s isolation.” About three dozen of these poems are inspired by poems or lines from other poets, most from members of the CantoMundo community, including founders Carmen Tafolla, Deborah Paredez, Norma Cantu, and Celeste Guzmán Mendoza. 

These poems are often-painful reminders of the pandemic’s toll on our mental and social health, one still manifested in isolation and disconnection. The opening poems are peppered with words such as terrifying, fearful, and weak-kneed, with images of desperately dancing the Vira de Roda. The poem “Bread” describes a world where the onslaught of “an unseen war criminal” meant that suddenly “life was forbidden and/everyone was an enemy.” Similar images of disorientation and anxiety are found in “We Still are not Breathing.”  

There is a disorienting quality to Accardi’s syntax as well: halting, incoherent, vague, lacking in time cues, shifting abruptly, changing or omitting referents, oddly capitalized. In the fever dream of COVID isolation, the poem “We’ll Come Down Close Behind” begins 

    And such and we have

    and we need and we want

    and we have and if it happens,

    we couldn’t leave, and there is not a

    never in the universe except now.

In the lines that complete the poem, a variety of plaints blur into a rush of feelings that overburden the strictures of language: 

    And such and such and the homeless,

    and prisons, and why can’t I

    leave my home without a mask.  

    We’d come down close behind

    In the middle of a crowd, as if we

    mattered and as if things were

    normal rather than a new normal,

    which is odious. Then, then, and then

    and could. 

Then, beautifully, the outpouring of negative emotions turns to poems recalling memories and feelings that ring true to the experience of all of us, for good or ill, as if they were rising to haunt one in a dream. “For Truth would be from a Line,” for example, recreates a time when the world seemed controlled and ordered,

    like a poem dealing with

    trees I memorized, along with everyone

    else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade

    at Luther Burbank,

    where the teacher handed out

    pastel marshmallows 

    when we behaved.

“The Right Measure of their Agony” describing days when:

        We held spiders

    And drank home-brewed absinthe as if we

    Were characters in 1920s Hemingway. We agreed

    to the word double-life as we ventured on the fire escape

    and we were solid, unbreakable and under the age of 30,

    with that unfinished feeling that troubled us,

    like not knowing your lucky number.

The next poem, “And Admits,” recalls:

    [ … ] rolling down the street

    Listening to Beethoven

    And drumming the side of the open

    Window with our feet

    Hanging outside

    As we turned through the fields of

    Almond groves stupidly

    being

The lens of the pandemic allows both poet and reader to see what is most meaningful and dear about these experiences. “With Cascading, Iron Straight Hair” describes familiar teenage angst, with Accardi’s added perspective of being the other:

The smooth dexterity

looking forward to an open gate for a place I never went to,

a Friday dance gymnasium with a fancy backless dress

my parents cannot buy.

The charm of sweet conflict, snarled waves,

my Portuguese frizz waves, a divorce of emotions between what

I see in the locker and who I see far away

in the pages of Seventeen magazine, near

from the teenage experience of greatness, charity,

a catalog of friends I could never connect with. 

Other poems go deeper into the complexities faced by children of immigrants, by Latinx persons, by all persons of color. One that I read and reread, even as others treated the same theme, was “Unlearning America’s Languages,” which ends:

Parents came to California to rise above while

blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm where

Old McDonald feeds the chicken and a city where

kids ride bikes and play Pong. It was sleep

and rise and keep damn quiet about anything

different. Tell the counselor you will ride the bus

and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future

that does not resemble any past you heard whispered

and fought about at night after bedtime

“All Unwavering Survivors,” one of several ekphrastic poems, exemplifies that trust in the value of one’s experience and the artistic cross-fertilization that energizes this collection. The title comes from a line in Gloria Amescua’s poem “Chanclas, Find Our Ground." Amescua won the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge in March of 2017 with her response to Lisa Ortega’s collage entitled "La Familia." The line from which Accardi draws her title captures the image of the family in the piece: “All unwavering survivors, nameless faces, amid the turbulence of politics that can cut them apart like paper dolls.” Anyone who is at all acquainted with chanclas culture knows the formidable spirit it represents. As Accardi writes, this spirit is “unconditional and sudden,” this family is “remarkable for their stillness and fury” even if “they are outside / a long solo flight of music, / set apart, detained, locked up.”

The conversation that Amescua began with the Lisa Ortega piece is further expanded by the Accardi poem. Another expansion happens in the poem “Holy Waters Heal the Border Scar.” That poem’s title comes from Norma Cantu’s poem “Border Bullets” and like Cantu’s poem treats of the precious cargo that mothers bear on their hips across the Rio Grande in search of a better life.

Similarly, Accardi’s “The Poor Kid with Something to Prove” takes Diego Báez’s poem “American Marine” and extends the source poem into a vivid portrayal of what drives the title character. Borges describe him as “the serenity prayer come to life, the punk with no attitude,” as someone “tight, like a hand-rolled cigarette, someone “solely glorious-rare and in the pocket moment of be here now.” He represents all those “boys who are full of promise,” who are on “the true-larger, needlessly-bold pathway to forever.” Accardi presents this indomitable, indelibly described young man as an exemplar of the spirit that drives one to survive a pandemic, an oppressive system, the journey to find a better life in a strange land.

So where does Quarantine Highway lead us? 

The isolation of quarantine leads the mind to dark places, as in poems such as “While I Count Like I Have Practiced.” That poem draws its title from Raina Leon’s poem about the smothering effects of pervasive racism, “Poetry Anxiety Disorder” and asks “How can we be strong and vibrant when we are not?” The ways we were told to cope with the pandemic—to tolerate rules, to stay in line—remind the speaker of all the lines and borders she has been told not to cross and of the lines she sees on her own face.

But these poems led me to the vibrant, beautiful, and multi-faceted CantoMundo community, founded in 2009 and inspired by the models of Cave Canem and Kundiman. In a 2017 interview for the NEA with Autasia Ramos, co-founder Deborah Paredez was emphatic about the CantoMundo commitment to fostering poetry communities—plural—recognizing the many communities of Latinx poets and the many connections with other poetic and artistic communities. I was welcomed into the currents and crosscurrents of the conversations between these poets and artists.

In one of the last poems, “One Season, my Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions,” Accardi refers to the poem “Onions,” by Juan Luis Guzmán. That poem begins by describing hands carefully lifting onions from the soil, then connects that experience with the speaker’s memory of “pulling out my naked self” while swimming with a girl. Accardi’s poem begins:

    Reading this, I cook Fresno peppers into Piri Sauce,

    red melting the spice to the Portuguese catch-all phrase

    for adding a teaspoon of red flavor into cooking.

    The deception of hot, couched into sweetness

    Mixed among red onions.

    We see the vivid color and forget the trouble

    we are going through endured in the sweet-hot flavor.

    Quarantine, not so unbearable when there is beautiful. 

In a time of unconscionable treatment of immigrant communities, these poems could not be more vital. Through empathy, through memory, through words, through communities, Millicent Borges Accardi shows us how the beautiful we share could bring us all through the seemingly unbearable.  

David E. Poston's poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Pedestal, Cider Press Review, Bull, MoonShine Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues, which won the North Carolina Writers' Network's Randall Jarrell Chapbook Competition. A fourth poetry collection, Letting Go, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.

 

An Anthology of Rain

by Phillis Levin 

(Barrow Street Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Abriana Jetté 

 

A chair, a thread, a wooden spoon. A friendship. A flame. A floor of lava. An Anthology of Rain, Phillis Levin’s sixth collection of poetry, transforms objects to memory, moments to matter. Whether in prose poems or traditional forms like tanka, readers slip through cities and mailboxes, moving from personal rituals to communal acts of survival. Taken as a whole, the collection conceptualizes change, as in the way a new chair changes a room, the way a hat changes a face, or the way a place changes a person. Boundaries are drawn, long-stemmed swords crossed, all while Levin delivers internalized rhyme with elegant sonic restraint.

When considering Levin’s oeuvre, change is not just thematic but also structural, as An Anthology of Rain unveils a compelling selection of new prose poems like “Map Makers: A Sketch” and “Secret Rites,” poems which blend narrative and wonder, offering associative leaps appropriate for the vignette’s fleeting qualities. 

“Secret Rites” opens with our speaker recalling a girlhood pastime of alchemizing her bedroom into an archipelago of make-believe. Her rugs become two islands; the oak floor, the ocean. She recalls how she’d sit on one rug and “without standing up, move to the other without touching the floor.” Over and over, day after day. What’s at stake? What would happen if her young body dared touch the wooden sea as she traveled furiously from rug to rug, back and forth, rug to water to rug? Her self-imposed rules are clear: she’d suffer “a death by drowning.” Imagination serves as Levin’s life-vest here and will continue to buoy her through the ebbs and flows of her young adult life. 

Levin moves on from this memory to reveal another childhood quirk of placing stray threads in the pocket of coats while shopping with her mother. With each dropped thread the speaker reveals she felt she “could be elsewhere, live inside that pocket.” She daydreams of strangers reaching into these coats to “discover a thread that didn’t belong.” Throughout the collection, readers are for Levin such threads. We are pulled in and out of coats and spaces and memories, finding meaning in places we did not know we belonged. 

Midway through, “Secret Rites” pivots from reflections on private rituals to the shared experience of choosing and losing a friendship. The speaker is in college when she meets someone with whom she shares a fast and intimate bond. At dinner each night, the speaker and the new friend take up the task of “blowing out the candle” on the table between them, then “holding a lit match as far from the wick as possible to see how far the little flame can travel.” This sisterhood of traveling flames transforms into a symbol of the intense emotions pulsing between the two women. But the friendship, like the flame, is kinetic, brief. The friends eventually outdistance one another. 

“Secret Rites” takes readers into a childhood bedroom, department stores, a college pub, and, at its close, like that thread, drops us off on a Zoom session during the middle of a poetry course our speaker is teaching during the pandemic. Students share childhood memories across screens. It is this conversation that prompts Levin to share her memory of rug island and those imaginative maritime adventures. “‘The floor is lava!’ one of them calls out from a square somewhere on my screen.” Squares erupt in laughter as generations converge. A moment of transformation, of change; what was once private reveals itself as universal practice. Secret rites become communal instincts. We might stitch different patterns, make different rules, but here we are, all of us, using the same thread. 

“Duel of Roses” also highlights the significance of shared play. In the poem, the speaker spends time with Italian painter Veronica Piraccini during the year of the Great Jubilee. Readers are whisked around the streets as the women enjoy pasta carbonara and the grandeur of the Roman scene. It is a reflection filled with the warmth, wit, and the wild ordinariness of an evening with a friend. Veronica is described as “a madonna in a fury,” and the two women, roses in hand, faux-fence with one another amid the pageantry of the Jubilee. Even as the evening ends, a stranger calls out to Veronica, "che bella, che bella / Marilyn Monroe / from a wingèd scooter on the go."

“Wooden Spoon” reads at first like a meditation on stillness, until readers recognize that stillness, too, causes change. The speaker considers how "It is good to be a wooden spoon / and not be broken." The line plays with readers, half shrug, half-truth. Its sentiment suggests the power of neutrality, of not getting too hot, not getting too cold. Levin doesn’t romanticize the spoon so much as test it against the rest of the collection’s more emotionally charged transformations. Is it possible to remain unchanged? Is it better? The wooden spoon might not conduct heat, but its soft whirl can change everything. 

In “To a New Chair”, the speaker delights in the arrival of a new chair, and she prepares the space, meditating on the will of the chair’s potential to “carry [her] far.” Levin plays with concepts of both the speaker’s and the chair’s presence and absence. Once the chair arrives, the speaker will be “beside the point”, a striking phrase that offers pause. Is this a desire to let go? To be transported elsewhere? Is it a will for invisibility? To let the new chair take over? Whatever it is, the chair is the reason. And glory to the chair, says the poet, whose grandeur is powerful enough to transform a space.

“Chamber” also explores the intertwined themes of absence and presence. The poem opens with a cummings-esque echo as Levin writes: “The heart at the heart at the heart of the room,” a simple repetition, mimicking the natural iambs as well as the da-Dum-da-Dum of the beating heart. The simple syntax, though, is in direct contrast to the poem's implications. We’re alive until we’re not. In the end the room remains a room, indifferent to whether we are in it or not. 

Chairs become portals, roses become swords, and childhood games resurface on Zoom screens. Has everything changed? Has nothing changed? The rug is still a rug; the rose, a rose; the room, a room. 

An Anthology of Rain hums with masterful musicality and a sophisticated attentiveness. Levin delivers transitions of philosophical eloquence with the straightforwardness of an investigative, attentive eye. The poems are fiercely clear and strikingly original. Like rain, it is a collection that nourishes, reveals, and, at times, reshapes the landscapes of our imagination.

 

Abriana Jetté is an internationally published writer whose work has been supported by the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and has appeared or is forthcoming in PublicBooks, Best New Poets, PLUME, Tampa Review, Poetry New Zealand, and other places. She currently teaches for Kean University and lives in New Jersey with her daughter. 

 

 

 Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

An Exodus of Sparks 

by Allisa Cherry  

(Michigan State University Press, 2025)

In the title poem, Allisa Cherry addresses the America her father grew up in—Southwest, downwind, irradiated: “My father / was so small when you began to powder / his milk teeth and bones with your radiation.” Equal parts family elegy, lyrical spar with childhood faith, and tender croon from a wellspring that feels like a gift, Cherry’s work is both haunting and generative.

—Shari Zollinger

Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics 

by Selah Saterstrom   

(Essay Press, 2017)

Saterstrom transgresses boundaries of genre and the practice of writing in this illuminating book. Having read it, I still hear whispers of the supernatural and its colorful possibilities.

 —Katherine Indermaur

Pelican

by Emily O’Neill 

(YesYes Books, 2015)

I finally pulled Pelican off our bookshelf and was engaged from poem one, “Kismet”: “But. // There is an onion / browning where my heart should be.” Come on—what a way to start a poem and a book. The rest doesn’t disappoint, working through rough emotion and grief with fresh and innovative poetic structure.

—Natalie Padilla Young

Trickle Down Theory 

by Kenan Ince 

(Moon in the Rye Press, 2025)

Kenan Ince’s sole and posthumous book of poems brims with possibility and dynamic intelligence. Educated as a mathematician, he voiced a queerness and loneliness I can’t shake. Lines like, “the worst thing I ever did was live seventeen years / inside my father’s house,” “for once my yellow dress is moon enough / to take the light’s communion,” and “I trace your outline with my words / and never find you inside them” will thankfully continue to rattle in the field of my awareness.  

—Nano Taggart

Sociopath: A Memoir 

by Patric Gagne

(Simon & Schuster, 2024)

This memoir covers a sociopathy diagnosis given in Gagne’s twenties and her quest through the American mental health landscape for viable treatment options. Her sincerity is startling, chilling, and hilarious as she reckons with her personality type and the world’s response to it. This book broadens the dominant narrative of what makes a sociopath and puts a human face on a misunderstood condition that is just one variation of the human experience.

—Laura Walker

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel 

by Dan Ephron  

(W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)

 

&

 

Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East 

by Nicholas Blanford  

(I.B. Tauris, 2006)

 

Killing a King is a carefully crafted narrative that proves, once again, the truth is (far) more appalling than fiction. Killing Mr. Lebanon displays politics as an exercise in blunting the potential of the many in service of the few. Both books are dense with detail but somehow manage to remain, if not page-turners, hard to put down. 

—Neil Flatman

  

The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life

by Margaret A. Brucia

(Princeton University Press, 2025)

The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life is a meticulously researched, emotionally resonant literary biography, centered on the diary entries, letters, and oral histories of a major 20th Century American poet. Diving deep into the Swenson archives, Brucia plucks gems of May’s language that refract the light of her mind, granting readers a glimpse of a brilliant, private, funny, flawed, and fiercely devoted poet. The result is a biography that feels as vivid and layered as the poet herself.

 

—Ben Gunsberg 

 

 

the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

by Matthew Cooperman 

(Free Verse Editions, 2024) 

Reviewed by Michael McLane

 

In the notes for the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, Matthew Cooperman describes his newest collection as a “curiously durational project,” a twenty-year work built on odes that explore the vulnerabilities and complicities of being American in the twenty-first century. These odes act as the collection’s tender, beating heart as well as its sedimentary and interrogative core. Questions are key to the idiolect of the poems. Their exploration of the roles of difference, activism and love in modern American life offer an accretion and momentum that sustain the durational scope of the work and, at times, offer possibility, perhaps even hope, as a counterpoint to the memorial nature of odes. 

The scope of Cooperman’s work manifests early in the book. “Snow Globe” introduces us to the poet as a child living in a politically active home in the midst of another profoundly dangerous time for the nation:

    It was January 6, I was six years old, which would’ve made it
                  the 60s, and it was snowing
    Snow filling trash cans like ashtrays. Ma and Pa
            distantly fighting the giant snowstorm.

This is one of the oldest poems in the collection, written in 2003 or 2004 in response to the hubris of the Bush administration. Cooperman admits the choice of January 6th was made at the time primarily for a kind of numerological alliteration, but the prescience of this choice is unnerving and haunts the rest of the collection as the far more insidious actions of the Trump administrations come to bear on the poems. This snow globe of childhood is predictive of coming storms that are multilayered and multivalent—from the tumult of the 1960s, in which both of Cooperman’s parents were politically active, to literal weather of climate change to the inundation of whiteness that lead to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. This progression is confirmed in the subsequent poem, “No Ode,” where:

    On a Wednesday at the Capitol something did happen, not the dream
    again deferred, not the righteous bear not the know nothing snake
             just the sickening spell of blood…

The poem weaves in and out of these two periods of monumental shifts in the body politic and violence on both institutional and individual levels. William F. Buckley and Allen Ginsberg are interwoven with 9/11, calving glaciers, and school shootings. The poem asserts and negates, asserts and negates, undercuts itself like a clumsy nation that doesn’t quite earn its ode. So, it is a “No Ode,” a longing to come to terms with atrocity only to find its accretion and recurrence, ending in the acknowledgment: 

    This is a history poem       This is not true       In my country there is
                no history but the lesson we didn’t learn

Cooperman collects, scours, and recontextualizes these lessons, salvaging bits of wisdom from the eternal return of American hubris and violence. The poems are often iterations of a nation in conversation with one another or talking past one another. Two of the most poignant examples occur in “General Context” and “Major Lure,” poems that apply cut-up and erasure techniques to speeches given by General Douglas MacArthur, including his “Farewell Address to Congress,” in the years immediately following World War II. In “General Context,” he writes:

    Americans never quit, 24/7 openness, we will be prepared to say
    something, do things…

    Our government has kept us within borders, as do governments
    do by law. Part of the American Dream is in the borders, where they
    hover. The best of luck is to be born into some kind of dream. 

This disconnect between sleeplessness and dreaming, paranoia and vigilance continues in “Major Lure,” where:
    
    One cannot wage war with old soldiers. Under no circumstances
    should their sleeping be disturbed. Our country is now fit
    for an ailing king. There is no substitute for the facts…

Sandwiched between these two remixed warnings from a departing general is the poem “Gun Ode,” which operates with the breakneck speed of its titular character and offers us an ode at its most heartbreaking. What is abundantly clear but goes unsaid is that this is, again, no ode (“No Ode”) in the conventional sense, but an examination of the catalyst for tragedy, a poem to the facilitator of odes rather than their recipients. It opens with a reference to Kent State, “a dollar with a gun in its mouth, a daisy with the sun / in its mouth,” as well as a callout to Pete Seeger in the lines “where have all the flowers gone // Gun—what have you done to our bodies?” The rate at which this machine births fascists is exponential in the modern era, as Cooperman understands all too well:

                        My hands don’t fit the bitter hasp
    
    As in naked and afraid, without means of protection, we were
    forced to love and evolve

    As in, O America, aren’t you tired of being an ode, why don’t you 
    ever use your Kevlar® shield?

            O First Responder, thank you also for being America

It is a poem that spares us no violence in its repetitions, its sonic qualities, its product placements and, most of all, in its complicity and sadness: 

    I can’t think of one happy memory ever associated with a gun

        Disarm      Disarm     Disarm      Disarm

    If the impulse to destruction is greater than the insight to love
             We are doomed to a garden of graves

    If freedom is money spent on guns, what is American grace?

Cooperman can envision a grace beyond fear and armament, and he does so again and again in this collection. Perhaps the most vivid example is in the alternative history he offers in “Country Mulligan,” where the hanging chads of the 2000 election fall differently and we have a President Gore and a “kinder enclosure […] / the planet turns cooler, greener, bluer […] / A Moslem spring flowers in poly-Arabian nights / Scheherazadism, Two Stateism, 23andMe goes viral.” All the dead poets and dancers and artists return; Sandy Hook is a place of community rather than mourning; the mass shooter at an Aurora theater finds love rather than profound loneliness. The poem is sad and hopeful, distraught and in love with possibility all at once. 

The hope that manifests in bits and pieces in “Country Mulligan” is more fully embodied in “Difference Essay,”  a ten-page poem that is simultaneously an ode to difference in all its forms—corporeal, cultural, political—and a study of being the parent of an autistic child, which shapes Cooperman’s understanding of the necessity of difference in American life. In a recent interview with the Laurel Review, Cooperman says of the poem, “atmosphere is a durational project, and that duration has also been the duration of my now eighteen-year-old autistic daughter. So the poem functions as a hinge of sorts. What happens to our country happens to us. And I didn’t really realize what was difference until I saw difference… the disease of homogeneity is actually—at least in my lifetime—an American disease.” Cooperman is unflinching in his indictment of this disease:

    But then I’d come to write of a terrible relentless
         sameness. The monochrome in the chromosome, the color
              of some and not others. Who is not other in the infinite
             catalogue of difference? To be riven is a state. “The shades
                  of the prison-house close round about us all”

And he is not alone. Voices and influences accrete as the book moves along, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than “Difference Essay.” In the passage above, he channels Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and philosopher Timothy Morton, whose concept of “hyperobjects” plays a recurring role in this and other books by Cooperman. In the same way that different versions of America talk to each other through these poems so, too, do different versions of the poet converse and illustrate how influences and mentors converge and diverge in these versions of ourselves. Whitman is a constant companion in these poems, as is Ed Dorn. The projective verse and proprioception of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson manifest in Cooperman’s use of the full “field” of the page as well as varying font sizes, colors, and other typographical techniques to score the poems. The result is a piece like “Difference Essay,”  a work so layered and polyphonic in its influences that it emulates the differences and possibilities the poet calls for in his nation as well.  

It is perhaps unsurprising then that, after the blizzard of violence, schism, and creeping homogeneity of the last twenty American years, Cooperman should offer up the final say of this collection to two poetic forefathers, Pete Seeger and Louis Zukofsky, in a poem called “Bouquet.” It ends on a couplet that ends on an ellipsis that echoes those past tragedies while planting literal and metaphorical hope in a new generation:

    the markings of progress
    by hook and drive

    anthem     anodyne     aloud

    the little hands
    the little hands stitch new flowers…
 

 

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.

 

Diorama

by Sandy Marchetti

(Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Joe Roberts

 

In Sandra Marchetti’s third poetry collection, Diorama, she pulls inspiration from the natural world, visual art, and the work of other poets to craft florid poems that are both elegiac and life-affirming. The subject matter of Diorama is diverse, with some poems focusing on animals, others discussing delicious food, and a few gracefully wallowing in plain, old human longing. And while this might seem an eclectic smattering of themes, that’s largely the point; the collection is a world in miniature, a comprehensive diorama of the many joys and sorrows of living. Marchetti masterfully ties these disparate elements together into a cohesive tableau through her consistent voice, dexterous rhymes, and vivid imagery. 
 
The book’s opening poem, “Shadow,” aptly introduces Marchetti’s technical skill as well as her ability to find beauty in nature, even when that beauty comes with an implicit threat. In the poem’s initial handful of rhymed couplets, we find the narrator out in the woods discovering mushrooms, appreciating the trilling of goldfinches, and reading a sign that states, “Foxes are opportunistic feeders.” So far, so pleasant. But in the second half of this piece, the narrator realizes a fox is watching her, perhaps assessing if it could eat her. As this revelation dawns, the rhymes slip and enjamb, cropping up in unexpected places. The effect is a musical disorientation which mirrors the speaker’s exhilaration at this encounter. “Shadow” then ends abruptly with these foreboding lines: "Hidden to your scruff in the gathering / dusk, I hold and release your stare, // that of a silver-eyed murderer / who smells breath in the air."
 
Many of the poems in Diorama are similar to this opener in both tone and craft. The collection does more than just revel in the threatening grandeur of the wilderness, though. It also enters into conversation with the poetic tradition as Marchetti draws on material from many other poets, such as Anne Sexton, Octavio Paz, and Li-Young Lee. Her dazzling “Refrain” even adopts the rhythm of an old Anglican hymn. 
 
In fact, it wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to call Diorama a collage of extant work, at least in part, since Marchetti incorporates outside influences throughout all three sections of the book. It should also be mentioned that the dedication for Diorama reads, “for all of the artists I stole from, and for my husband,” and the book has a lengthy list of endnotes crediting all the poetry and artistic works from which Marchetti borrows lines, imagery, and rhythms.
 
Of all the poets (other than Marchetti) who haunt Diorama’s pages, though, none features so often or prominently as Louise Glück, the one-time poet laureate of the United States. To start with, Diorama takes its epigraph, “At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” from Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” a metaphysical poem in which an iris speaks to humanity about the renewal which follows death. 
 
In addition to this epigraph, there are many times throughout Diorama when Marchetti alludes to Glück directly. For example, in the poem “Semblance”:
 
I see in the hue of a winter not yet
gone. The sun slips from stripped
trees and between the irises
 
Glück does not remember
the daffodils, gentle in their clusters,
clutching at the yellows of their throats.
 
A couple playing catch slides
from view; still the diorama
assembles, the scene runs true.
 
It’s also worth noting that this is the first and only time Marchetti uses the word “diorama” within the book. This gives “Semblance” almost the same weight as a titular poem, and it lends special gravity to Glück’s presence therein. 
 
But perhaps the boldest of Marchetti’s references to Glück is found within her poem “The Door,” which appears fairly late in the book. Here, Marchetti inverts Glück’s line which she chose for the epigraph, stating, "I want to say, / this is the end // of happiness. Will / I accept love?"
 
This is a clever and all-too-human response to the narrator’s acceptance of endings in “The Wild Iris” and its eponymous collection. While it might be a comfort to believe that some vegetal rejuvenation comes after the suffering of life, as Glück’s narrator claims, when you actually find yourself at that threshold, it’s difficult to see the end as anything but a loss. 
 
The resignation of Glück’s narrator throughout The Wild Iris requires a surrender of what you are so you might become something else, but Marchetti wants to go on embracing her humanity, even when it comes with sorrow. Several of the poems in Diorama, such as “Ebb Tide” and “Depth of Field,” affirm as much. 
 
Through its loving encapsulation of life’s varied delightful aspects, Diorama stands as a respectful rebuttal to The Wild Iris’ insistence that death is merely the end of suffering. Death, Marchetti contends, is also the end of every knowable happiness. 
 
Marchetti’s ardor for existence also manifests in a key technical difference between her and Glück; Marchetti uses rhyme playfully and with abandon, as I’ve noted, whereas Glück almost always apportioned rhyme with a teaspoon. For instance, while Glück wrote no shortage of poems on the subject of longing, it's impossible to imagine her crafting something so pleasantly rhymed and unabashedly sentimental as these lines from Marchetti’s “All that I can tell from here”:
 
    A map notes you and I
    span 3,000 miles,
    pin to pin; farther
    we have never been.
 
    A valley unclasps
    beyond my hands.
    I anchor my skin
    above the rocks and slide
    in the cooled blue,
    an ache away from you. 
 
The unveiled pathos of this piece, as well as Marchetti’s evident zest for the poem as a sonic artifact, starkly contrasts with Glück’s austere, analytical style. 
 
Despite her fervor for life, though, Marchetti also expounds on impermanence fairly often. Poems such as “Refrain” are stunning presentations of death, transformation, and what gets left behind. This theme is most apparent in what I would call the collection’s crowning jewel, “Triptych,” in which Marchetti imparts these somber lines:
 
    All things
    are migratory—
    leaves on trees,
    feathers molting.
    The geese cannot
    live in their coats
    much longer…
    Their necks wander on
    toward dusk, toward
    time, the endless
    crest of the preserve.
 
Yes, Marchetti is in love with the world and her place in it, and she loses herself in that love through poems like “Of Late,” “County Donuts,” and “Witness.” However, the most beautiful images she can summon are so often tinged with their own ephemerality, as they are in “Triptych.” No matter how much we may love our lives, Glück’s door is one we cannot help but step through, which Marchetti acknowledges through her depiction of the present moment as naught but a transitory preserve.
 
Marchetti drives this point home in the collection’s final poem, “A Swim at Europe Bay Beach in July, Deserted,” which borrows imagery from Anne Sexton’s “Nude Swim.” At the end of this borderline desolate poem, Marchetti writes:
 
    I am convinced now that more
    than anything what we want
 
    is to live forever. No one can
    see us, smashed as sea glass, open—
 
    the ants eating our cherries
    at the shoreline.
 
These concluding lines perfectly encapsulate the overarching tension of Diorama; nothing lasts forever, not even the most beautiful things, and so we suffer. Nevertheless, the ephemeral joys to be found in nature, art, and our relationships with other people make us long for eternal life, even if we recognize that such a life would be plagued with the unremitting agony of loss. 

Joe Roberts is a Salt Lake City poet. In his debut chapbook, Anathema, he speaks from the confluence between sacredness and profanity to find redeeming beauty in a world that can so often feel cursed. Anathema was published by Moon in the Rye Press in 2024, and Joe’s poetry has also appeared in Arlington Literary Journal, Juste Milieu Zine, and the Moonstone Arts Center’s 2024 anthology on human rights. With his free time, Joe writes for SLUG Magazine, takes communion at local coffee shops, and hikes the Wasatch Front with his partner, Brooke.