A noteworthy collection with a compelling backstory of community building and personal empowerment.
An inspirational volume offers poetry published by Untold Stories, a collective of women of color residing in Michigan.
This collection of diverse voices—“Black, Latinx, Arab, Indigenous, and Asian”—predominantly features free verse written in the first person. Each of the three main sections is tied to a specific workshop held in 2019: “Mothering”; “Migration, Rootedness, and Belonging”; and “Survival & Vision.” A fourth section highlights selected poems from these earlier chapters translated into Spanish, thereby allowing bilingual readers to compare and enjoy both versions. (The volume’s introduction is rendered in English and Spanish as well.) Uncredited photographs of various workshop participants and settings appear throughout the text, with design and graphics by Miriam Cuevas Enciso. The book also presents brief profiles of all 26 contributors, including the five “founding sisters” of Untold Stories, debut editors Rios, Simmons, Quiroz, Ibarra-Frayre, and Reza. One of the most impressive poems is “Microchimerism” by Maria Thomas, which represents a conversation of sorts between a mother and son as they trade stories of amazing animal feats: “You’re in kindergarten now / and the factoids / are getting / more sophisticated / more bizarre / more flatulent / and gory.” Reflecting their unbreakable bond, the title refers to the phenomenon whereby fetal cells can remain in a mother’s body for long periods of time. Thomas continues with animal imagery in order to combine the enthusiasm of learning with the responsibility of educating children in matters of social justice. On a more harrowing note, the mother in Quiroz’s “Truth” tries to protect her 3-year-old daughter from an abusive partner: “Then he blew up / No talk back allowed / he said / He’d taken enough / living brown in world of white.” Moreover, the lack of punctuation effectively lends a breathless quality of immediacy and escalation to the text. In “Awareness,” Ibarra-Frayre considers the challenges of immigration and employs the image of boiling water—alternately dangerous, transformative, and comforting—to convey both suffering and strength: “And the boiling grief of my mother’s prayers / Creates an impenetrable vapor of / Protection.” Every workshop participant was invited to publish at least one piece. While the volume as a whole may strike some readers as occasionally uneven, this project underscores the notion that poetry belongs to everyone as a form of expression and connection.
A noteworthy collection with a compelling backstory of community building and personal empowerment.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-56637-5
Page Count: 68
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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