Nest of Stars

by Nicole Verrone
(Atmosphere Press, 2021) 

Reviewed by Holly Mason

Nicole Verrone’s debut poetry collection, Nest of Stars, moves with grace and fervor. The poems are acute, attentive, and they shine. As the title suggests, these poems bring the heavens to earth. 

The poems in this book offer reflection, contemplation, and wonder. The speaker’s questions illustrate a curious mind and a comfort in, and embrace of, uncertainty. Mystery is welcomed—as in the poem “stars” when Verrone writes, “But these stars, light grown from nothing, stand in / mysterious assembly.” Later in the same prose poem, she continues, “And yet, housed in a code, in the hot bed of / synergy where dust meets dust, the flowers of light and night / fill deciduous space in the eye….” Here, stars described as “flowers” direct the reader’s attention from the sky down to the land.

 
In a later poem, “eclipse,” on this same, contemplative path, the speaker asks: 

Does one pay more attention when life begins
than in the coasting, tween, adult, mid-life scenes,
abruptly re-focusing in the end?
What does payment of attention mean?
Do we fade like static snow;
an eclipse of moments?

Alongside these existential questions, the poem moves into the territory of pregnancy and birth and then closes with this compelling tercet:  

It passed so fast,
I passed so fast
from light to fog to darkening. 

This poem brings the “heavens to earth” through the language of “eclipse,” which the poet uses to describe earthly beings and their life cycles. With attention upon a lineage of women, the poems span generations—from the speaker’s grandmother, to her mother, to herself as daughter and mother, to time with her own daughters. The speaker is nonetheless steady across the pages—the voice consistent. She recalls a childhood memory in the poem “afterwards”:

I hid behind the circle of lawn chairs
in the limbs of a mimosa tree
heavy with a secret

I was four.

In thinking of memory and matriarchal lineage, we can return again to what I think of as a thesis poem of the collection, “stars,” where the speaker recollects her grandmother with incredible clarity. The poem begins with “My perception of stars is dim. These lights are scattered / pockets of floating fire,” and moves into an introduction of the farming grandmother who “viewed the stars as God’s drawer of diamonds.” Verrone writes:

Down to earth means down to earth. If I could
hold her hand and walk through her dark farm, my 
grandmother would see the starry sky as acres of potential 
good soil. Perhaps she would compare star beds to prolific 
crops, thriving as an iridescent stream of mineralized water. 

Atmospheric and packed with truly dazzling imagery, Nest of Stars offers meditations on existence and beauty. There is a speaker in these pages who is pleased to experience beauty solo, but is also pleased to be in community, companionship, and with her beloveds. A later poem in the collection, “ride home,” offers an illustration of the glorious moments when marvel is shared, in this case between mother and daughter:

Last evening, 
I lifted my dancer
home over autumn fields. 

[…]

Amber and wheat plowed brown
eaten by silver columbine.
The profuse perfumed earth,
deep-breath smell of dusky dust
arrested she and me
mid-harmony
and we locked eyes.

[…]

Smoking bales
lassoed with twine
surrender to November.
But my dancer, here,
in her pink tights,
leotard and pursed lips,
her sharp jawline and lilac eyes,
holds my hand
for landing. 

You’ll find in these pages carefully crafted lines that invite us to read and reread them for their deliciousness and precision. For example, this couplet in the poem “observe”: “observational visibility occurs / in the net of epiphany.” Or these lines in “veil”: “theories are veiled, / hidden truths of youth, / sweet like china bells.” Or this inviting stanza in the poem “profile”:

Press your ear
to the canyon wall,
warm as Sunday bread.
Cupped close-
lobe skin to stone,
just a minute or two
like a daughter listening
to waves 
recorded 
in a conch shell. 

These lines lure the reader in with sensory details, offering a moment of stillness and welcoming awe. Often in the collection, such atmospheric moments are followed by moments of wisdom to savor. In the opening poem, “voice,” we are told “it was all oak and grief, / file after file” and “moonlit mountain path, / barefoot tones / in a sullen summer.” “Voice” ultimately winds around to a line of captivating truth, “time will not unwind.” Verrone’s poetry is both highly sensory and unpretentiously intellectual; phrasing serves as  a clever vehicle for philosophical thought. Take for instance this stanza in the poem “scar”:

Pain creates memory,
notching an end
when the scene’s sting
suspends the clock. 

Here, the speaker contemplates the way a scar still holds ache over time. Alongside a speaker’s captivation with, and delight in, mystery and the supernatural, the speaker expresses interest in science, logic, and intellect. As in the poem above, we don’t just have the metaphor of the scar, we also have the medical science behind it, too. We have the stars as luminous points and as space matter. We don’t just have a heavenly celestial sphere, we also have astronomy and  “NASA’s image as the center of a dahlia” (from “stars”). 

Being human on Earth means living within a range of experiences. There are moments in the poems that examine corners of loneliness and others that delight in familial love—sometimes both within the same poem. This duplicity is finely rendered in the poem “hunger” as the speaker asks in one stanza, “Isn’t loneliness cruel?” while in another confesses:

I asked my father this morning for help. 
My battery sparking in a dark cave
trapped in exhaustion with self.

 
If the specifics in that stanza aren’t captivating enough, the next stanza’s descriptions are no less sharp:

His cherry-faced joy
cooed,
not with anticipated scolding,
but cheered me in the furrow. 

And in the final lines of this poem, a sonic and cerebral offering:

The feast, and wedding fleece
awaits at the end
of solemn roads.  

Various modes of storytelling, mythologies, fables, and age-old stories offer backdrop and backbone for a number of poems. At times, with parable-like movement and framing, the poems exist in a space of both wonder and wisdom. Borrowing from and repurposing these narratives welcomes the reader into an arena that feels at once familiar and new. There is sacrament, demon pigs, Eden, Camelot, Neptune, Orion, Athena, and Icarus. There are wise men silenced by a babe and a night of holy prose. There are seven swans, seven sins, and seven wonders. 

The poem “eden ash” expresses concern over climate change in our current moment and thinks ahead to what may be (or may not be) for our grandchildren—“now Eden smolders / and our grandchildren / with metal shoes / will pop exhaust bubbles.” A good steward of the earth, the poet laments the “price of emissions, / the cost of omission” and ends with this powerful stanza, a climate prayer, a fervent petition:

Power mutes
voice of low repute.
Lend her thine ear-
with a sharp point,
erase the bottom line.
Retrace 
the verdant fruit laden vine
for them
before apple infection
makes masters of war
look like all men. 

The book’s speaker is a disciple of nature, and there is a love of the natural world throughout that is almost transcendental at times. Many poems offer a rootedness in place, as in the final stanza of “hen” when Verrone writes:

Fragile enough to die,
or brave enough
on chilly tips of October
to hide my bones
in the crook of your limbs.

In Nest of Stars, lines and stanzas can be enjoyed for their imagery and prosody, but the reader will also find a buried treasure of ideas to piece together and questions to consider. Take, for example, these stanzas from “siren tone”:

Can one hear their own siren song—
honeyed pitch
or is it behind cognition
in the womb of a dream region?

[…]

Hush it, quiet it,
wail it out into deep midnight.
The drape of dreams 
is a poet’s seam. 
Isn’t hunger innate?

That question sings out there in the end, thinking about the human condition, after the poem explores notions of filtering through the varied voices that aim to lay out our paths. The collection as a whole explores another type of hunger—hunger for discovery. Near the end of the collection, in the poem “amelia,” the poet offers a striking elegy for Amelia Earhart and is in awe of her courage. This poem, like the whole of Nest of Stars, praises the daring spirit, the daring girl, the daring woman. The poet closes with Amelia’s own words: “the stars seemed near enough to touch and never before have I seen so many.” These words are perfect and haunting—an embodiment of awe.  

Fish Town

by John Gerard Fagan
(Guts Publishing, 2021) 

Reviewed by Yuki M. Cole

I’m of Japanese descent and moved to the UK as an infant, so I was intrigued by John Gerard Fagan’s new Scottish/Japanese poetic memoir Fish Town. Fagan is 29 years old and his life is in pieces in Glasgow, Scotland. He struggles to find a permanent job and is in a stagnant relationship. So, instead of continuing to tread water, he pawns his belongings, packs a suitcase, and moves over 5,000 miles away for a new life in Japan. 

Fagan is not another Japanophile who loves everything about Japanese culture and indulges in extravagant nights out in Tokyo. Instead, Fish Town digs under the surface of both the country and the writer. It is Lost in Translation on a much larger scale.

 

The story is told in small chapters that lack punctuation. You feel like you are in that new world with Fagan as he struggles to create a new life for himself in a small fishing port that was once famous for tuna but is now a shadow of its former self. The poems pull you into the fishing village and the pace keeps you there. The opening chapter reveals the sense of loneliness that never quite goes away:

 

only the truly lost wash up on the shore of Yaizu

a fish town in a forgotten part of Japan

faded posters of its 1960s glory days still littering the streets

but that’s where I was

April 2013

 

I expected Fish Town would be similar to other gaijin (foreigner) memoirs about their whacky experiences living in Japan, but this was far removed from those texts, and exceeded my expectations, both as a memoir and as a collection of poetry. It is realistic and raw, rather than sugar-coated and cute, as the chapter about his first neighbor in Yaizu titled "a fisherman next door" reveals:

paper walls

23:00 on a Wednesday

he blared salary man porn and grunted along to high-pitched squealing

I banged the wall thinking maybe he didn’t realise the volume         

It only got louder

I got used to sleeping with headphones in  

 

Fagan’s minimalism is perfect for this kind of epic story as we feel blasts of summer heat, the rotten smells of the surrounding factories, and the blinding lights of Tokyo that draw him closer like a moth with damaged wings. It holds nothing back; the poems are vulnerable and emotional, but also have power. Nothing comes easy, but Fagan possesses determination and work ethic in abundance. The chapter titled "wounds" is a perfect example of his mindset as he lives in a tiny, rural apartment and wonders about the other foreigners he has met so far:

some people take their wounds to a foreign land

some place far far away

a new start

can be someone completely new

but an act can only last so long before the real version of themselves comes out to

     breathe

and takes over once more

foreign wounds don't heal in a place like Japan

they only get worse, fester, and bleed out

that's why most from the West don't last long

their experience should have been a week-long holiday

two at most.

As we move through the story, Fagan’s life twists through both rural and urban Japan. He joins the metal band Far Beyond Demise, wins a contract with a semi-professional football team in Shizuoka City, and a chance meeting with a Japanese actress and her cat in Tokyo shapes the narrative, which spans seven years. It is heartbreaking at times as Fagan gets his life together only to see it unravel time and time again. 

I should have seen it coming

there was a scratch of a feeling it would all sour

and run into dark drains

but I ignored it

and didn’t look again 

until that scratch was a puss-filled wound with flies drinking on the surface.

 

Readers of Fante will find familiarity with this debut writer, though it has a distinctly Scottish feeling to it. It blends the loneliness of Into the Wild, the blinding pace of Papillon, and the honesty of The Heroin Diaries. You can feel the homesickness, despair, and sense of not belonging. The chapter "five more times" about missing his elderly parents struck a chord and brought home the complex repercussions of his move and attempts to start a new life:

I worked out that if I stayed in Tokyo and went home every two years

and they lived to 70

I’d only see them five more times in my life

that thinking anchored me in the moment

I was too far away if I wanted that to change

 

At moments such as this, Fish Town left me speechless, thinking about my own life and choices. People like myself who are feeling lost and still looking to find their place in the world will relate to this collection. It is a compelling and original debut written from a unique perspective, in an idiosyncratic style. Much like the titles mentioned above, Fish Town has the makings of a cult classic.

 

Everything

by Andrea Cohen
(Four Ways Books, 2021) 

Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach 

Some readers might remember the game show Name That Tune. The contestants would vie to identify a song given the fewest notes. They’d have to hear in those few hints a melody, lyrics, and a rush of associations. I often feel Andrea Cohen is challenging herself with similar limitations. The poems in Everything are short, sometimes really short like “Guide to Becoming a Human Shield”:

Live

near

spears.

The poem is only three words, but does an enormous amount of work. In the first line, we get to the heart of the strategy posed by the title; you become a human shield first by surviving. You live through the danger. The next two lines expand the thought: you also have to live near the danger, near the spears. You have to be endangered to learn how to protect yourself. We leave the poem still thinking about the dangers the speaker may have faced, or those we ourselves have faced. The dangers in these poems include the deaths of loved ones and a romance. We also learn to survive in an unsafe world and address the spiritual through a Jewish lens. These poems live in dynamic tension: tiny and vast, funny and tragic, stated and unstated.

Like a hard-hitting joke, Cohen often has a set up and then a punchline that delivers, as in “Right as Rain”:

Try saying that

as the giraffes—

neck and neck—

are slowing

for Noah.

It’s funny to take on the cliche “right as rain,” especially in light of the flood. It’s funny to think of giraffes having an opinion on our common sayings. But this poem is heartbreaking because of the word “slowing,” the giraffes dragging their feet, not wanting to get on the ark and yet not safe to stay on land. There is no good choice here, and, in fact, they have no choice much like all the wild animals that have been corralled and controlled by humans. The poem starts with a small commentary on language and in thirteen words opens to a vast and tragic commentary on humanity and ecology.

Many of these poems explode and expand, a bit like koans, zen puzzles without a specific answer and meant to provoke enlightenment. Here is “Fellow Traveler”:

She went everywhere

with an empty suitcase

You never know when

you’ll need to leave

swiftly with nothing. 

The reader has barely taken in the strangeness of traveling everywhere with an empty suitcase and the metaphoric implications that entails, loneliness, unfulfilled, hope for the future; when the poem switches not just rhetorical strategies, from narrative to aphorism, but from third person to second. The reader is now being addressed directly. The poem has gone from a problem someone else must deal with to your problem, your life. 

But who is the fellow traveler? That’s the puzzle. On first reading, it seems to be the suitcase itself, but it also could be cultural baggage. It is part of my Jewish cultural heritage, one I share with Cohen, that you should be prepared to leave swiftly with nothing. Or, the fellow traveler could be God, the promise that a protective benevolence is with you on this journey. In 18 brief words, Cohen’s powers of expansiveness are on full display, shifting from the mundane to the metaphysical while effortlessly flipping the point of view and implicating the reader.

Many of these poems, especially in the first section, have a spiritual undercurrent. Even if the subject matter of the poem is as prosaic as a wrecking ball or getting a tattoo, Cohen invokes  the divine (“Desert Isle”) or the existential angst of being human (“Everything"). I’ve encountered few poets who are as capable of giving prominence to what is unsaid in the poems as they are to what is said. When in “Le Danton” the old poet sitting at the café on St. Germain says, “Tell me everything” to the sugar packets. I feel a lifetime of seeking underneath those lines, a soul crying out to the universe. 

In “Openings” the speaker acknowledges that death will come, but she deflects and refocuses this inevitability with sassiness and celebration of the small beauty of a backlit pear tree:

Eternity has closed its doors—

good riddance! I didn’t want

forever, forever—just this 

pear tree, branches

backlit and the fruits I can’t get to. 

Cohen’s poems are often both grounded in the real like the pear tree and stretch like its canopy into the philosophical. They are insightful and quick, delightful and powerful.

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake and Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021), and After I stop Lying (Cherry Grover Collections, 2015). She he has been published in Vallum, Poet Lore, and The Southampton Review among many other journals. She is a writing coach in Seattle. Find out more at DeborahBacharach.com.

My German Dictionary

by Katherine Hollander
(The Waywiser Press, 2019) 

Reviewed by Star Coulbrooke 

     

It takes skilled wordcrafting, an ear for clarity, and a penchant for multiple levels of meaning to hone syntax into diction as rich as one’s country of origin. Katherine Hollander applies those traits to rouse language from an uncomfortable heritage, fashioning stanzas that expand into layers of national and ancestral history defined with elegant simplicity, intricate imagery, and complex metaphor. 

The introductory poem in My German Dictionary first presents a simple fact of the speaker’s personality:

I couldn’t be a good Jew, so I tried

to be a good historian. I couldn’t be

a good historian, so I wrote poems.

Then the poem complicates its assertion by insisting on what the speaker can and cannot write about, not the “Shoah” but the “Somme,” not the “heart” as “pocket watch,” but “swans / snails, stars, and mud.” Images arrive and gather intricacy with each stanza’s plea, asking “oak-owls” and “grandfather clocks” to help find her country, and handing readers a “good traveling coat” adorned with “fox fur collar / and a fat gold tassel,” along with the enticement of an irresistible metaphor:

Pull it on, and from the wide sleeve a little

cedar ladder nudges out, ready to take you away.

The first few rungs of that aromatic ladder are taken up by the seminal poem in Section I, “Answers to the Question Europe,” a series of sonnet-like scenes in a life with the last line of each section set apart in denial or affirmation, as in “dumplings” that “floated like little boats // not making a path I could follow home,” or a “half-dead” black cat that “showed me / its beautiful paws, which it held out // pink as soap, like little cameos.”  

Four connected poems comprise the middle of Section I, layering on scenes that pull readers further up the ladder: two German Jewish sisters who look alike and live together amiably except when fighting over “one another’s political affiliations” (“Sophie and Escha, 1929”); a young girl and her parents who live through the Berlin blackouts “at the stove, one burner on / a blue water lily of light” (“General Strike, Berlin 1920”); “dead youths” who “come in, / dragging their next war behind them” (“Great War”);  and a wounded soldier taken in by a family of bears in his delirium, bears who took off their skins “and hung them up in the hallway, and without them / they looked just like men” (“The Wounded Soldier”). 

To complete this suite of stories on the first few rungs of the ladder, the speaker asserts “Why I Don’t Do Genealogical Research”—assertion in the title, but not in the poem. Here we are treated to a lovely and fragile image, “the soul / like a translucent little figurine,” sustained through multiple other images as refracted and gradual as daylight glinting and graying with sunset, the beams and then the colors and then the soft, dark, descending souls of children whose lives were “very brief” and whose souls, the speaker wishes, 

    might have been lifted, 

and tucked, and zipped inside the thick  

impossibly soft fur buntings 

that are the striped trousers

and silken hoods of my two

cats, Henry and Christopher,

housecats whose lives are “gentle,” who are beloved, whose eyes reflect the souls of those children who began transitioning so beautifully in the poem, into the speaker’s “own murdered kinspeople,” and therefore her attitude against genealogical research.

Section II demands a strong and steady hand to hold the ladder, first for “War Suite,” a short poem series of excruciating contrasts, as in “The Family of Skeletons,” all those innocents killed in every war, who “wore our hearts in our breasts like red purses” and “used to eat blackberries / and bouillabaisse, falafel and cherries,” but who now “wear nothing, drink bowlfuls / of air.” Or “The Recruiter” whose heart “cramps like a fist,” who “lures the beautiful boys.” Or “The Parents” who “let the devil in the front door,” whose regret cannot be restrained:

Our son’s face looked into his face

like a bird charmed by a serpent,

a flower mesmerized by sun.

I know now I should have

let loose the unfriendly dogs.

I should have barred the door

with my own body.

“War Suite” then gives way to the “Book of Icons,” addresses to particular characters from the annals of European history, rendered with intricate description and infinite care. “Rosa Luxemburg,” for instance, who “crossed the border from Germany,” to make “an uneasy home, a mouse / in a knife drawer,” who was killed for her “murderous red language,” but “hush now—here you are”:

    in the meadow you loved so much,

up to your waist in the deep grass

and wild flowers, your eyes covered

with a bright visor of light.   

“Book of Ikons” melds with “Exile Diptych,” a poet-historian’s fancy for imagining Bertolt Brecht “abstracted” in Svenborg and searching for “something true” in Hollywood. The final poem of Section II, “Dear Union,” is in protest of Marine Le Pen and is written as an apology to the European Union, which the speaker describes as a lush, benevolent beast with “raisin-scented paws,” a spine “made of bridges,” and “solar panels” for a hat. 

Hollander’s skill in storytelling is enhanced by the creative accuracy of a poet/scholar, so that the first two sections of the book have already prepared readers for the third, in which the titles are in German, but there is no translation of the titles inside the poems. Instead, we get definitions in story-like images that impart knowledge of a time and a people we need to recognize if we are to live in a world that goes beyond the trauma of a dark and needlessly oblivious past. 

Here are just two poem excerpts, for example. “Die Courage” defines a concept, endowing it with human traits:

Everything soft or tender,

be banished. Anything that asks 

mercy, be exiled. A hard

cheese, that’s what you are,

sinewy, and with a voice

like smoke or a spice grater.

The speaker follows Courage “through the woods,” through poverty and illness, until the concept transforms into human action: “Foolish woman. / Go find your son.”

In “Verliebt,” young lovers begin as innocent creatures destined for a tragic fate:

Oracular valentine, with the drunk

little black milk snakes curled up

on your forehead. Their tongues

lapped the saucer and they fell

fast asleep. Your heart a black

heart, buttoned on with a mitten.

These 25 poems of definition tempt and thrill with adept imagery. Hollander is one of those rare wordsmiths who can place three or four adjectives in a row and make them work like magic. (See “drunk / little black milk snakes” in “Verliebt,” above, and check out the three-adjective detail in “Ohne,” where “seals sleep on the slick / black living lace that coats the rocks.”) 

Hollander’s techniques extend beyond the elements of language, syntax, and imagery. She has organized a manuscript that moves with meaningful intention from the moment that little cedar ladder extends from the sleeve of the traveling coat, “ready to take you away,” to the final moment of the final poem, “Zusammen,” imploring, “Call everyone. Call everything loved. / Take my hand. Let’s go.”

What a privilege to be led by this writer of inspiring intellect into a collection that reveals ever-intensifying histories of people and events, each unfolding in poem after poem, section after section, to culminate in a memorable volume that begs rereading, time after time, like all good tales of seemingly impossible human nature.

 

Atomizer

by Elizabeth A. I. Powell
(Louisiana State University Press, 2020) 

Reviewed by Jamie Wendt 

     

Elizabeth A. I. Powell’s newest collection of poetry, Atomizer, is a lyrically critical examination of American culture with a specific (and often humorous) critique of online dating and the associations of smells; odors and sensuous scents drift into poems from memory and art, connecting humans to each other. Readers of Powell’s previous works, especially her poetry collection Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter, and her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of J. Crew Catalogues, will notice her continued fascination with how art builds a collective memory for future generations and how memory and relationships expose the way humans react to their environment. 

Within the title poem “Atomizer,” Powell begins many stanzas with the label “(Memory)” interspersed with sensory experiences relating to dating and the scents associated with love and specific romances. Powell’s ability to transition from explicit childhood memories to ideas about the power of scent helps the poem build upon the speaker’s experiences of searching for her own identity. As the poem continues, it becomes more critical of online dating:

A formula means to build a form that contains sensual interplays that      exist within sense.

(Memory): Sometimes we argued under the hot sun of coriander and      citrus, or an 

orchard of pomegranates that tried to set us free from algorithms that      market us.

The base notes bring depth, solidity to a scent, an associative connection.

This poem introduces some of the associative leaps that Powell will continue to make throughout the rest of the book as she repeatedly uses smells and other sensory language to question the speaker’s frequent desire for romance and love despite the lack of a suitable partner.

Powell mixes dark imagery with humor, particularly when writing about men’s sexuality, including an “insemination man” who comes to her grandmother’s farm and is described as “Mysterycow juice God.” The speaker knows that she “will read The Handmaid’s Tale soon enough” and then reflects on how much American society loves milk: “Starbucks… make[s] baby formula for grown-ups.” Her cheeky comments about cultural obsessions, from Starbucks to sex, fuse together with the peculiarities of the situations she creates, whether it’s an insemination man coming to the farm or other childhood moments, like getting her mouth washed out with soap in “Ars Poetica,” due to the speaker’s 

[ … ] nasty sentiments: 

how I loved the world so hard I hated it. 

Things either clean or dirty, 

smelled lovely or nasty, 

my mother tried to make me say it nicely. I couldn’t. 

There is a consistent tension within Powell’s poems from how the speaker wants to express her views of the world compared to how society refuses her ideas and neglects her. In “Killing Rabbits,” Powell confronts the confusing, contradictory information about sex and puberty to which children are exposed and how they are then left to fend for themselves, resulting in “killed rabbits,” which becomes a metaphor for unborn babies. Powell circles around images to tell a story, so that scattered throughout the poem are phrases such as: “I have killed a rabbit,” “this is before the abortion clinic bombings,” “Peter Rabbit was almost killed,” “Peter Rabbit ate soporific lettuces,” “everything I touch wilts,” “we use pull out methods,” “we fuck like rabbits,” and “death is everywhere and pretends to be life.” Powell’s stream-of-consciousness associations build layers of meaning throughout her poems, folding cultural references into the traumas of the speaker.

Powell is successful at writing long poems that extend for a few pages, as many of her poems do, often divided into sections. One such poem, “E-Diptych,” highlights the constructed narratives of online dating sites users as a means to create a digital identity for both themselves and their potential matches:

[ … ] And when he 

writes me, he makes me,

and when I make him, I write him.

We are invented, by the wanting

and not having of others.

Adding to her critique of the way people view online dating sites, Powell writes in the second section of this poem, “you live in this little box spread across / the screen of pixelated desires.” She builds on the loneliness of the dating site’s patrons who are disappointed when someone’s hair doesn’t actually match the photograph, and Powell plays with the truth and lies of these online profiles, despite the fact that the speaker does feel desperate and wants to find a lover and companion in many of her poems, including “Shulammite,” where the speaker swipes through photographs of potential dates on her phone, but finding someone honest is nearly impossible.

Powell elaborates on the power of odors in connection to memory as she moves into a series of poems focused on specific family history, such as “In Vilnius,” and poems about Vermont, including “Burlington Is Nuts Today” and “Lying Perfume Bottle of Chanel Pour Monsieur.” The latter poem begins with the sensual line, “tell me everything,’ he said” as if the reader has entered a romantic encounter of a man eager to learn about his new lover’s past. Powell continues with the statement that “odor is identity’s first ardor,” and later, “there’s something familiar / about the animalistic scent, the refined contradiction.” She concludes:

Fantasy is what we create when we have nothing 

            left to say about a world that has left us trendy, 

fetishized, and empty. He researched me as an olfactory 

curator might, my social media Lysol life, 

how to turn moments into hyperrealism.

Powell’s criticism of some of the foundations of modern American culture are particularly acute, as she continues threading sensory details emphasizing scents that allow the reader to inhale each memory and moment. Powell sporadically includes ekphrastic responses that often include mentions of perfumes and atomizers as a means for women to assert their identity or achieve a particular purpose, as in “Judith Perfumes Herself,” after Judith Chicago’s Judith setting at The Dinner Party, whose “elegance of ritual” involves “behead[ing] Holofernes” while “bearing / her fragrant skin, newly perfumed, like a soul.” She emphasizes Judith’s power through her actions as well as her fragrance and its power of seduction. 

Elaborating on her critique of dating culture, Powell makes fun of stationary exercise equipment, which has TV as “its only scenery” and “beeps phony miles and pretends hills,” seemingly gifted to the speaker so that she “won’t morph into your ex-wife instead of your trophy.” 

Powell’s blunt, humorous explorations of American values, healthy lifestyles, as well as relationships and dating, keep each poem fresh and interesting as this collection builds and culminates.