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REVIEWS - MAY 2026
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Maybe the Body: poems By Asa Drake Released February 24, 2026 Tin House 2024 National Poetry Series finalist 88 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Scientists still don’t quite understand all the unseen ways in which our bodies connect—within their internal systems, among their myriad parts, between one another, within communities, across generations. There are miracles of connection pulsing through and from our bodies every minute, all generating from a form of love. And it is those connections which drive the poems in Asa Drake’s debut full-length collection, Maybe the Body: poems, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series.The collection consists of 38 poems, beginning with a proem and then divided into six, epigraphed sections of varying lengths. Each epigraph grounds the work in place, connecting lives from The Philippines to Florida, because as Drake writes in epigraph 6, “It’s so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in.”
The natural duality of foundations in The Philippines and in The United States, two vastly different, but connected, lands runs throughout Maybe the Body: poems, like breathing deeply through both lungs. And Drake’s work confronts both the intentional and unintentional unkindness which sometimes result from that duality, such as in “Tonight, a Woman,” where Drake writes, “I have heard someone I love speak around someone I love, like English is a sieve / for catching one another’s cruelty. // Catch and hold.” The framework of love as a lens through which the speaker experiences cruelty highlights the contrasts within the conflict, making the imagery of the cruelty which follows that much more impactful. It isn’t just intentional cruelty which harms, though, as Drake explores in “More than Half of Americans Can’t Name an Asian American,” where she writes, “Shame is a human emotion I have a lot of / questions about.”
There is an inherent tension between the connections extended intentionally outward from the body and the connections which intrude upon the body in Drake’s work, causing a dynamic interplay in poems such as “I’m Interested in How Animals Teach us Pleasure,” where Drake writes:
A friend reads fortunes in my hair when my lover won’t, love
refracted between us to make everyone in the room more beautiful.
And still, someone enters to ask if I wasn’t born lucky.
I keep a whole rabbit to help me survive. Oh, it eats
and eats at what I was born with.
The contrasts in the poem’s language concerning the lover, the friend, and the intruder are stark. The lover refuses the intimate and requested act of reading “fortunes,” but the friend complies. The result is that the friendship and all who are witness to it are rewarded through beauty. The rewards, however, are fleeting when the scene is interrupted by a thoughtless intruder whose assumptions create disorder from the tranquility a moment ago. The implication is that both beauty and destruction are at least in part reliant on connections outside of the body. The interplay between internal and external connections is a recurring motif in Maybe the Body: poems, creating both positive and negative results, as Drake suggests in “Assemble the Mockingbird,” where she writes, “Every found object is evidence // of disenchantment. / The opposite is also true.”
Connections of all kinds resonate within and between bodies, stretching even through time in Drake’s debut collection. The visceral and the physical connections from lineage matter, as Drake suggests in the poem from which the title originates, “Maybe the Body is a Loved One,” where she writes, “Even the chimera has siblings and children / she resembles.” Building connections across time begins first in familiar features passing from one parent to his or her progeny, and then continues into what is done, what is intentionally created, later, as Drake writes in “The World Begs for Transcription,”where she admits, “I stay so long in one place my hair lines the nests. I don’t know how to hold / down what I love, but I’ve eaten so much fruit trying to lure the animal to me.”
The key to every type of connection is love. Love is the miracle of connection which pulses steadily through the interior connections keeping our body systems running, the connections among family members and communities, and the connections through generations. Asa Drake’s debut collection, Maybe the Body: poems, radiates with love, even in less than ideal circumstances, as in “Wading Into the River Beneath the Interstate,” where Drake writes:
After Eden, everyone goes home.
To plant seeds. To say we love the unrelenting
aspects of the world and carry them with us
into its aftermath, which is full of potential.
Asa Drake is the author of Maybe the Body: poems, her debut full-length collection of poetry, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, and the chapbook One Way to Listen, the winner of the 2021 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest and a 2023 Florida Book Awards Recipient. Her work has appeared on The Slowdown podcast, as well as in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Poetry Daily, and other places. More information on Drake and her work may be found at her website, https://www.asaldrake.com/
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Antibody By Elane Kim Release date February 23, 2026 River River Books 84 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
With the careful observation of a scientist and the wordplay of a linguist, Elane Kim’s powerful debut poetry collection, Antibody, reimagines and redefines the body as a home— something separate and sometimes conquerable, something both smaller than the power we ascribe to it and vaster than our realization allows. Organized into three, named and epigraphed sections of twelve to fourteen poems each, Kim’s Antibody tenderly explores binaries of individual and societal, Korean and American, disaster and redemption, all in relationship to the boundary of human form and the comfort we derive from its consistencies. It is this comfort which helps us define home, as Kim reminds in “Aubade in the Aftermath,” when she writes, “We are just soft bones and the places they inhabit.”
Perspective, subjective in its processing and limited by its sightline, is its own binary of physical and mental, and the poems in Kim’s Antibody use the additional layer of perspective to include and set apart within the verses. In “Second Try,” the speaker is an included part of the whole of society, denoted by the use of we when Kim writes,“When there were birds and only birds, / we stopped resenting our wingless bodies.” The same is true of the inclusive our and we within “Corollary,” where Kim writes, “So many small disasters / to call our own, these calamities we call bodies.” But in “Axiom,” the speaker is outside of the world, observing as a solitary I, when Kim writes,“The loneliest parts of the world / are still trying to be found. I want there to be warmth, even if / it cannot be mine.”
The inherent pull between inclusion and exclusion in Kim’s debut collection doesn’t always create negative tension. Sometimes, as in “Axiom,” the speaker’s position outside of the world is beneficial to the observation, and therefore carries no weight of negative connotation. In “Sonnet as First Words,” however, a list of imperatives from a second-person perspective, the separation is bitter. There is a deep divide, reflected through parallels of country and citizen, tense and language, as Kim writes:
Say mother. Say father. Say it over again. Let your tongue
become a washboard, your body past tense, your body minor
chord. Say amendment, contraction, the declaration
like a prayer. Say warzone. Say warzone. Say,
I am waiting for this country to love me back. Future
tense.
Tense matters in Kim’s lyrical verse, both the tenses as they are used within the verse and the tense of the verse. In “Manifesto for the Immigrant Poet,” Kim chooses present continuous as the tense for all verb forms within the poem, building a narrative of ongoing, long-term tension into the language of the verse. With the body again as a consistent framework of home, Kim writes:
25. We are not looking for forgiveness. We are not looking for the good years, the
synonyms for survival that fit in the pinch of two fingers. We are looking for a
pat of flour on kneaded dough, a sewn patch over skinned knees, another bowl
of soup, a body to be sung.
26. We are looking for hunger and it is looking for us.
In addition to building layers with the inherent tension from detailed explorations of binaries and tense, Kim’s debut collection also explores form and formatting. The structure of forms such as the sonnet, pantoum, and diptych become haunting frames for lyrical verses which pull from history as their forms help create reflections of the past in the present. As Kim writes in “Eomma’s Pantoum”:
Kitchen smoke collecting into fingers, into fists
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
apron salted with bleach stains,
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
way of returning home, nesting, preserving
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
can only remember so much. No
way of returning home.
Interspersed among the form poems and the free verse poems, there are several poems in which Kim also plays with formatting on the physical space of the page, juxtaposing well with the lyrical verse and creating rhythm and movement through the collection. The use of space in “Good Daughter,” a poem based on Korean myth, works to create pace, as the spaced sections throughout the poem mimic the leaping of fish or of waves, moving the longer poem quickly until lines of tension surface through the intentional pacing, causing the reader to slow a moment and consider more deeply, such as when Kim writes, “there is some place that will love her best // when she is gone.”
Astonishing in its keen observation of self and society, tender in its understanding of humanity and the ephemeral and wonderful bodies which house us, Elane Kim’s debut poetry collection, Antibody, is a powerful redefinition of the body as home and an exploration of the collective tensions its impermanence causes—within society, within cultures, within our personal worlds, as Kim writes in “Sonnet at the Supermarket,” “The bravery of searching for sweetness / where there is only dust.”
Elane Kim is a Korean American poet and student at Harvard College. Kim won the 2024 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, she was the winner of the 2021 Columbia Journal Winter Poetry Contest, and she is a Davidson Fellow in Literature. She is editor-in-chief at Gaia Lit, and her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, and other places.
Perspective, subjective in its processing and limited by its sightline, is its own binary of physical and mental, and the poems in Kim’s Antibody use the additional layer of perspective to include and set apart within the verses. In “Second Try,” the speaker is an included part of the whole of society, denoted by the use of we when Kim writes,“When there were birds and only birds, / we stopped resenting our wingless bodies.” The same is true of the inclusive our and we within “Corollary,” where Kim writes, “So many small disasters / to call our own, these calamities we call bodies.” But in “Axiom,” the speaker is outside of the world, observing as a solitary I, when Kim writes,“The loneliest parts of the world / are still trying to be found. I want there to be warmth, even if / it cannot be mine.”
The inherent pull between inclusion and exclusion in Kim’s debut collection doesn’t always create negative tension. Sometimes, as in “Axiom,” the speaker’s position outside of the world is beneficial to the observation, and therefore carries no weight of negative connotation. In “Sonnet as First Words,” however, a list of imperatives from a second-person perspective, the separation is bitter. There is a deep divide, reflected through parallels of country and citizen, tense and language, as Kim writes:
Say mother. Say father. Say it over again. Let your tongue
become a washboard, your body past tense, your body minor
chord. Say amendment, contraction, the declaration
like a prayer. Say warzone. Say warzone. Say,
I am waiting for this country to love me back. Future
tense.
Tense matters in Kim’s lyrical verse, both the tenses as they are used within the verse and the tense of the verse. In “Manifesto for the Immigrant Poet,” Kim chooses present continuous as the tense for all verb forms within the poem, building a narrative of ongoing, long-term tension into the language of the verse. With the body again as a consistent framework of home, Kim writes:
25. We are not looking for forgiveness. We are not looking for the good years, the
synonyms for survival that fit in the pinch of two fingers. We are looking for a
pat of flour on kneaded dough, a sewn patch over skinned knees, another bowl
of soup, a body to be sung.
26. We are looking for hunger and it is looking for us.
In addition to building layers with the inherent tension from detailed explorations of binaries and tense, Kim’s debut collection also explores form and formatting. The structure of forms such as the sonnet, pantoum, and diptych become haunting frames for lyrical verses which pull from history as their forms help create reflections of the past in the present. As Kim writes in “Eomma’s Pantoum”:
Kitchen smoke collecting into fingers, into fists
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
apron salted with bleach stains,
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
way of returning home, nesting, preserving
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
can only remember so much. No
way of returning home.
Interspersed among the form poems and the free verse poems, there are several poems in which Kim also plays with formatting on the physical space of the page, juxtaposing well with the lyrical verse and creating rhythm and movement through the collection. The use of space in “Good Daughter,” a poem based on Korean myth, works to create pace, as the spaced sections throughout the poem mimic the leaping of fish or of waves, moving the longer poem quickly until lines of tension surface through the intentional pacing, causing the reader to slow a moment and consider more deeply, such as when Kim writes, “there is some place that will love her best // when she is gone.”
Astonishing in its keen observation of self and society, tender in its understanding of humanity and the ephemeral and wonderful bodies which house us, Elane Kim’s debut poetry collection, Antibody, is a powerful redefinition of the body as home and an exploration of the collective tensions its impermanence causes—within society, within cultures, within our personal worlds, as Kim writes in “Sonnet at the Supermarket,” “The bravery of searching for sweetness / where there is only dust.”
Elane Kim is a Korean American poet and student at Harvard College. Kim won the 2024 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, she was the winner of the 2021 Columbia Journal Winter Poetry Contest, and she is a Davidson Fellow in Literature. She is editor-in-chief at Gaia Lit, and her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, and other places.
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Superbloom: Poems By Catherine Esposito Prescott Release date February 11, 2026 Gunpowder Press 83 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
In so much of literature, grief is described in terms of water because of how it flows and engulfs and sometimes gets caught in eddies which circle back on themselves, but in Catherine Esposito Prescott’s second full-length poetry collection, Superbloom, grief and its aftermath are granted instead the colors and light and even the sharp beauty of a desert superbloom— illuminating, surprising, and vital. Broken into three, epigraphed and numbered sections, the poems in Superbloom sing reverently of what has been lost and what is still to come with vivid color and clear imagery, alchemizing grief into hope. As Prescott writes in “The Ride”:
…Even
as the future swung open its threatening door.
How do we? How can we? The eaves
channel rainwater down the sides
of our house. The rocks below glow
green with mold. Basil seedlings shout
through the soil. My heart is dust,
but nothing is unbeautiful here.
Color and the effects of color are explored throughout Prescott’s Superbloom, in the imagery within the verses as well as in dedicated color meditations such as the haunting “Meditation on Blue” where Prescott writes:
If truth had a color, this would be it. A shade
less than shady. Improbable skin of the gods
who are ether. You now. You now. Moved
from this world to the next. Moved from skin
and bones to pure energy. Cobalt and indigo, and primary.
The additional weight in the repetition of the ghostly “You now” in the middle of the stanza moves the poem from a simple recounting of myriad blue examples into an incantation of loss and perseverance. The grounding force of the colors pulls the poem, and its speaker, from shade into energy, from improbability into primary. In the title poem, “Superbloom,” Prescott again allows garish, even aggressive, color to carry layers of meaning beyond the physical when she writes:
Around us, fog grows light. We are in it,
but poppies shout orange, the agave screams
its yellow flowers up toward an imaginary
sun. The grass no longer just grass, lemondrop
flowers dance on its breath. Even
the cliff holds tufts of heart-red flora.
Every living thing blooms bright as our hope.
Vivid and repeated use of color is one of the ways in which Superbloom is able to connect the individual poems, creating a larger conversation about grief and what comes afterward. In addition to the overt application of colors within the poems and in the poem titles, there is an intentional use of color and light within the indirect descriptions in the poems, as well, such as in “Touch” where Prescott writes, “Sunlight spreads / as if from a broken bottle. I want to touch everything.” Prescott also uses repetition of poem titles and vocabulary to connect the individual poems in Superbloom. There are several poems in the collection, all different, which are entitled, “Fallen Poem,” mirroring all of the ways in which we, in grieving and in living, fall. And there are several poems in the collection whose titles begin with “Meditation on –” providing additional connections of thought for the collection as a whole. The heart-wrenching “Meditation on Yellow” continues the repetition of color as a metaphor in the collection as it minutely examines the vocabulary of grief. In it, Prescott writes:
…What is my job
here, as a mother missing her son? There are no words
for a mother without her son—not widowed or widower,
not unmothered—beyond bereft, without, lacking, minus,
beyond bereaved, deprived of, dispossessed,
which implies layered suffering, lamentation, and left.
We know very well what I am missing. We have no
language for who I am, for what I may become.
One of the techniques Prescott uses to ground the palpable grief in Superbloom is the use of form poetry to provide structure for the intense emotions in the same way lattice would for blooms. Prescott includes several form poems in the collection, including sonnets, an abecedarian, and the beautiful tercet, “No Words” in which Prescott writes:
I don’t know how to find that place inside
where every chamber and hollow fills with grace.
Today, my tongue is a rainbow tied
to a rock, held, contracted.
In addition to the established forms Prescott uses to ground the emotion in Superbloom, there are also many poems in the collection in which the poem’s form, particularly the way in which space is used on the page, is an additional, intentional layer of the poem. One example of this technique is “The Swimmer” in which Prescott uses the space on the page to create physical space for the subject of the poem, as well, by writing:
So she swam across the sea,
one woman a boat
meters ahead another behind
and drones like judges
following waiting for her throat
to burn, for her to choke
on saltwater.
Catherine Esposito Prescott’s Superbloom is an incredible alchemy of grief, drenched in the beauty of a desert, overwhelmed with color and life. The collection manages to remain realistic in its understanding of how grieving affects our daily lives, as it progresses from its repeated elements and clear imagery into a future filled with hope, created both diligently and intentionally, as Prescott explains in “The Swamp,” “We could / not have seen that remembering your exuberance / would be the only light worth navigating by, the only way / we could dare move through our craving to see you again.”
Catherine Esposito Prescott is a poet, an editor, and a yoga philosophy teacher in Florida. She is co-founder of the nonprofit SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) and editor-in-chief of the daily online literary journal SWWIM Every Day. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Superbloom and Accidental Garden (Gunpowder Press, 2023), and two chapbooks, Maria Sings (dancing girl press, 2017) and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Prescott’s recent poetry appears in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, Verse Daily, and other places. More information about Prescott and her work may be found on her website: https://www.catherineespositoprescott.com/
REVIEWS - FEBRUARY 2026
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Black Mestiza: poems By Yael Valencia Aldana Released January 21, 2025 University Press of Kentucky 122 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor Black Mestiza - The University Press of Kentucky |
The complex history of the Caribbean provides a tonal blueprint for Yael Valencia Aldana’s debut full-length poetry collection, Black Mestiza: poems, like an underpainting, and shadows of racism and exploitation throughout Aldana’s verse create causal layers for community, hope, and celebration, which shine in this collection. The verses in Black Mestiza begin with a proem, and then the collection is divided into four numbered sections of varying lengths; but Aldana’s art in this book begins before the verse. Her painting graces the cover, and the image there provides a rare concrete visual for all the various parts which make up the complex, multitudinous lives carried within. As Aldana writes of these lives and the verses’ responsibility to them in the proem, “Talisman”:
All of you
curl in my ear,
I will carry you.
Sleep in my Mestiza’s body,
Lay aside the violence that forged this body
my body
Lay inside my shell of soul and flesh
We are all in here together
Together, generations of women from Trinidad and Tobago, from Columbia, from Florida sing in Aldana’s verses, celebrating how each component joins to build the depth of the harmony. As Aldana writes of her ancestors in “Las Mestizas”:
I can feel them moving
below the water
that is my skin, crowning at my mouth
a bubble of light that trembles and is released.
we do not care what you think.
you watch sheenless water.
we are not there.
The movement within the poem from the I and them to the we who “do not care” is paralleled by the movement of the words on the page—progressions which feel natural, like waves. The sounds in this section are also set into parallels with Aldana’s use of assonance—clustering the vowel sounds into their own waves, progressing from the ow of crowning and mouth to the series of long e sounds from released through the ending we—mirrored by the alliteration of the w sound in the final three, quoted lines. The attention to sound is one of the many ways in which Black Mestiza: poems connects timelines and locations to create a celebration of life.
When we celebrate a life, we frequently use indicators of progress along life’s paths—loves, deaths, people and places which matter—and all of those ideas are within Aldana’s debut, full-length collection. It is the progress within and among the poems, themselves, though, which help create a sense of generational stability within the collection. One of the techniques Aldana uses to create this sense of progress is a shared vocabulary of words and images across poems, such as when she writes in “Faith Comes at Night” about the “red black, blue black / mars black, austere belly of the night” and then again writes of a separate, contrasting, complete darkness in a poem just a few poems later entitled “Mars Black Night.”
Images, too, are shared across poems. Marine animals frequent many of the works in Black Mestiza: poems, from an eagle ray to a hammerhead to all manner of fish, such as in #3 of the Rodrigo Suite, “Aquarius Sun, Leo Rising, Virgo Moon” where Aldana writes:
his affection holds like
still water, silver rivulets
flashing by metaled fish
in cool dark depths.
he is still there even when absent.
Fish frequent the work, and their presence connects the work back to the Caribbean Sea of its ancestral origin, as well as connecting the individual poems to one another, from section one’s “Small Dark and Moving,” in which Aldana writes, “I am fish / moving under power / malachite scales flashing” to section four’s “Nineteen” in which the poem’s speaker and her mother both become fish and “move together through this verdant / wonderland full of leaves turning brown and dangerous, small / furred animals.”
A second technique Aldana uses to create the sense of progress within and between poems is the use of suites of poems within the sections and the use of anchor poems at the beginning of three out of the four sections. The “Small Dark and Moving” series of poems share a base of vocabulary and images which then move through a variety of forms and ideas from one section to the next, paralleling how the generations and cultures interwoven in the collection move and transform through time and space. As Aldana writes of the transformation in “Small Dark and Moving: Black Bird”:
Open
Open
I am not
perverse
I am small dark and
moving
I am moving in
waves
I am
I am moving rippling
Black Mestiza: poems is a collection which manages to connect light across time and space without ignoring shadows. The shadows are there in poems such as “Re: Ni**er”, but then the very next poem in the collection is “Angela Davis Was in My Car,” carefully placed to remind readers, “She was supposed to die in prison / But she didn’t. She lived. She lived and rose / lived and took us with her in her rising.” The poems in this collection build connections of hope and celebration from their shared shadows, and it’s one of the strengths of Black Mestiza: poems. As Aldana writes of these connections in the Pushcart Prize-winning “Black Person Head Bob”:
I saw you he says. I counted you he says.
I got you. You got me
For our ancestors below the sea
from our ancestors across the sea
I see you, you see me.
Yael Valencia Aldana is a poet and artist in Southern California where she teaches creative writing. She is also the Editor in Chief at Purple Ink Press, and she is a member of the board for Aunt Lute Press. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and the winner of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series Prize 2023 in poetry, as well as a finalist in the AWP Kurt Brown Scholarship in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Torch Literary Arts and Cutbank Literary Journal, among other places. Before Black Mestiza, Aldana published the chapbook, Alien(s), with Bottlecap Press.
More information on Aldana and her work may be found at her website, https://yaelaldana.com/
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In the Good Years By Laura Cresté Released September 15, 2025 Four Way Books 106 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor In the Good Years – Four Way Books |
Paralleling the painting of a whale’s spine which curves across the cover of Laura Cresté’s debut full-length poetry collection, In the Good Years, there is a curving spine of memory within the collection itself, which connects and supports generations of times and experiences throughout the individual poems. Divided into four, unnamed sections of varying lengths, Cresté’s In the Good Years uses a narrative strand textured by family lineage and history and a precise dexterity of language to stitch together bones of memory from past, present, and future. As Cresté writes in “Radius,” “It’s a privilege to know where your dead are buried // when it might have been otherwise.”
Section three of In the Good Years contains an epigraph which begins with “It should be remembered..” and one of the ways in which Cresté’s poems honor the value of memory is by refusing to shy from historical and cultural memories of guilt and pain. According to Cresté’s notes at the end of the collection, the sectioned poem which follows the epigraph, Categories of Guilt, adapts historical types of guilt used in analysis after the Holocaust into a framework for considering the military dictatorship of Argentina from 1976-1983. In the final poem of the series, “Generational Guilt,” Cresté writes, “For those of us who dwell in the after / is guilt the engine in the choice to look or not look / too closely at the forces that let us be born”. The idea of choice and its interaction with action or inaction is a connective thread for the Categories of Guilt series of poems, just as the idea of memory is carried, a connection, throughout the individual poems in the collection.
Cresté doesn’t just examine memory from the perspective of her cultural history, though. The memory of her individual family’s history is explored, analyzed, and honored in poems like “Calle Sin Cielo,” which connects the speaker’s present vividly with her aunt’s and father’s pasts, and “We Love Bad Dogs,” in which Cresté declares of the women in her family, “We love like a sentence / that once given / cannot be rescinded.” And in poems such as, “Poem for My Children Born During the Sixth Extinction,” the threads of family history reach forward, into the future, where Cresté predicts:
We’ll still have the old-fashioned disasters: broken elbow, split lip.
I’ll try not to scare them, but when I see them eating unwashed grapes
I’ll tell them about pesticides. One will forget but the other won’t eat
fruit for years. When they ask if I believe in heaven I will lie.
One of the structural ways in which Cresté builds the idea of memory into the collection itself is through the interspersal of several long poems and sectioned poems within the work. These poems are some of my personal favorites in the collection, and I love the way Cresté uses them to extend the examination of one or multiple memories across long expanses of time and thought. The fourth section begins with the poem, “Ida,” titled after the category four hurricane which hit Louisiana in 2021. Moving smoothly between clear imagery of the destruction inside and outside of the speaker’s house during the hurricane through generations of time to the speaker’s grandfather’s cross-oceanic voyage and The Great Hurricane of ‘38, Cresté becomes myth-maker and dispeller, as “Ida” begins and ends with the mythological power of water. As Cresté writes:
The water entered twice: rose
from the cellar and fell
through the roof. In the guts
of the house, past the drop
ceiling, hundred-year-old
horsehair insulation
wet and furring the walls,
as if coming alive in the squall.
A horse reborn
out of water– a myth
never written down.
And yet, Cresté is the one who writes it down, who brings the myth to life and gives it memory, if only to provide means by which to refute the water’s mythical abilities later within the poem. The long poems in this collection work effectively, providing opportunities to carry the memories to their caesuras, and to tie the memories to history and each other.
In the Good Years is a collection which branches from a central spine of memory into generations of time, places, and experiences. The individual memories of the first person speaker are extended and connected from original (and historically-miraculous) beginnings into a future beyond sight today. Unflinching and tender, Cresté’s debut collection reminds her readers that there is still more connection to come. As she writes in “You Should Feel Bad”:
The future humans won’t see this night sky,
certain constellations drifted into the cosmic soup.
When they read our maps will they believe us,
and will they be here, puzzling the charts, reading anything at all?
For now, everything is still possible.
Laura Cresté is the author of In the Good Years, her debut full-length collection of poetry, and the chapbook You Should Feel Bad, the winner of a 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Northwest, and other places. More information on Cresté and her work may be found at her website, https://www.lauracreste.com/
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purl By Michele Evans Released February 14, 2025 Finishing Line Press 67 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor purl by Michele Evans – Finishing Line Press |
When I read the required parts of Homer’s The Odyssey in high school many years ago, I felt sorry for Penelope, waiting, weaving, and unweaving, but I really didn’t consider the many, many other women who are impacted, used, manipulated, and discarded throughout the story until I reread it as an adult. It is these women and their unheard voices who inspired the poetry in Michele Evans’s debut collection, purl. By personifying places and things as feminine, as well, though, Evans does more than simply retell ancient stories. She builds layers of connection based on an intentional empathy. Divided into two sections whose titles refer back to the dual meaning of the collection’s title, purl bends and pulls on time to cradle the experiences of women in Homer’s The Odyssey as if they were the experiences of today’s Black women, knitting intricate connections of love, loss, survival, and betrayal across millenia into, as she says in “xenia,” “pages brimming with songs / muffled voices rarely heard.”
One of the ways in which Evans builds such strong connections across time in purl is through the use of form to create an additional layer beyond the words, adding visual context to each character’s voice. The arrangement of the visual text in poems such as “labyrinthia” and “sirenia | in two parts” is as important as the words themselves. In “sirenia | in two parts,” a visual contrapuntal, Evans writes, “which half note should i sing about? / which half will liberate and make me whole?” just before the poem itself breaks into the halves of which it speaks. The vocabulary of halves resonates throughout the poem, and the individual halves of the contrapuntal reflect the two, distinct halves of the mythical creature from which it takes its name. In the stretched sonnet, “penelopia,” Evans uses a modified Petrarchan format which begins with a sestet, followed by five quatrains and ending with a couplet. The five quatrains in the middle of the poem help to create a sense of waiting, a sense of building, reflecting Penelope’s waiting in the epic, her years of worry about her missing husband and her troubled son, “chasing after the king who never could // searching for a father who didn’t drown.”
Throughout purl, Evans cultivates the voice of not only people, but also places and things. Personified and feminized, Evans gives a village a voice in “laestrygonia” when she writes:
i coughed up
every contact trace
memory of him
but when the rubble
refused to leave,
my grey heart dimmed--
And a feminine olive tree is given a voice in “olivia” where Evans writes, “she was crushed bitter, briny / until she found wisdom lurking / in the place where the pit resides.”
The violence of ownership (both of people and of things) is a repeated element through the poems in purl. Many of the characters voiced in the poems are those overlooked or misused by Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey, and that vocabulary of violence is carried by Evans through time as a connection, a persistent reminder of the ways in which some things have not changed. In “domestica,” the reader is told at the beginning of the poem the voice is “those who live a life of toil”:
mopping up hollow grounds
where our fallen souls once
lie bloody, beaten, and broken
hanging from gnarly oaks
In the Best of the Net nominated poem, “anticlea,” Evans creates connections from mother to mother, through time:
this is not the moment i have been waiting for—hades
is a mother’s hospital waiting room, a dreadful place
where restless soles pace, where twenty minutes feels
like twenty years waiting for my sons’ return
Very subtly, though, Evans uses the maternal connection to remind the reader that some sons never come home.
There are connections among all of us, and it is those connections which help us to continue, together, as a society. Hopefully, paying attention to those connections also allows us to grow and change and progress. In Michele Evans’s debut poetry collection, purl, she uses poetic form, personification, and individual character voices from people, places, and things inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey to illuminate the connective threads of love, loss, survival, and betrayal across millenia. As she writes in “melancholia”:
i rewear their sandals and shackles donned
by female forces from the past and present
to navigate my future, never forgetting
always remembering what they look like.
Michele Evans is a poet and teacher in Northern Virginia where she advises Unbound, an award-winning high school literary magazine. purl is her debut poetry collection. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she has published individual poems in Artemis Journal, Mid-Atlantic Review, The ASP Bulletin, and other places. More information about her publications, awards, and events may be found on her website, https://www.awordsmithie.com/
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Shade is a Place By MaKshya Tolbert Released November 4, 2025 Penguin Poets (Random House) National Poetry Series Winner, 2024, Chosen by Maggie Millner 86 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor Shade is a place by MaKshya Tolbert: 9780143138457 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books |
Rooted deeply within their environment, MaKshya Tolbert’s debut poetry collection, Shade is a Place, selected as a National Poetry Series Winner, layers natural images and political and social observations with meticulous language to create verses which weave humanity and nature together as completely as mycorrhizal networks among trees. Divided into four sections which alternate between numbered Shade Studies and titled Shade Walks, and concluding with a fifth section of two individual poems, Tolbert’s poems are eco-poetry in the same way their often-mentioned willow oaks are plants—it’s one of the simplest ways one could categorize something much more complex. In the extended haibun, Shade Walk: “a life in rehearsal,” Tolbert explains the connection, “I live as a blurred register, happy to be wayward. / Robins puff out their chests, reminders to breathe. Shade is a place / that circulates, if we let it. The more we walk, the less my chest hurts.”
The interconnectedness of humanity and nature is one of the strongest motifs in Shade is a Place, and Tolbert makes the connection clear immediately in their opening poem, “Eastbound” when they write, “Believe me when I say plants and people find // their way.” The way, according to the poems in this collection, is at least partially dependent on realizing and understanding just how important this natural connection is to each of us. As Tolbert writes in Shade Walk: a Haibun:
You are your own tree talking to trees. See your trunk, your case of a
body. Spring is for feeling what has always been there. See how you
make your way through, how you start again--
Leaves curl inside out;
you just go with what you know,
being tree yourself—
The lines between the human and tree aren’t simply blurred in Tolbert’s verse, they interweave and branch from each other naturally, as parts of the same universal whole. As Tolbert makes clear in “Shade is a place: relief is my form,” “What is my entry point into the deemed / errant biome of my body? Relief / is my form—(re)leaf by leaf by leaf”.
The connection to trees in this book isn’t just a physical connection manifested through imagery of seasonal cycles of renewal and rest, though. Trees exist in communities, and Tolbert uses the social level of trees to highlight social and political commentary in Shade is a Place, as well. In “Tree walk with worry,” Tolbert writes:
I worry even the violence is mycelial
branching from the tree of each of us
I worry evenly about the willow oaks about what
spreads from all our petioles I worry evenly
Deepening connections between trees and humanity through complex metaphor layers in which both the trees and the society suffer from a sentient virus of violence, passing through our deepest connections to one another, Tolbert weaves clear natural imagery and social commentary throughout Shade is a Place. The connections are overt, intentional, and skillful. In “Shade is a place: an urgent need,” Tolbert highlights additional social and political constructs when they write:
You could say shade is my refuge,
compass of what matters.
Tell me how to pace myself toward comfort.
The Tree Commission appoints me
out of an urgent need for [diversity] shade.
Here, the double meaning of shade to include the shade of the speaker’s skin and its inherent value politically to the Commission in the poem contrasts sharply with the speaker’s “compass of what matters”—the environmental shade provided for the community by the city’s mature trees. In the concrete poem, “Tree walk with cops,” Tolbert uses physical spacing with branches of individual lines to suggest a separateness between the poem’s speaker and the political agency of Law Enforcement. Tolbert writes:
Sometimes we take part
Do what we are told
You tell a tree to grow
It grows too much
Stop you tell the tree
Or else I’ll call the city
Look at you all those use
-less limbs
New technologies are advancing scientists’ understanding of the relationship between our human lives and trees, such as the new evidence pulled directly from tree rings which suggests a volcanic eruption began the series of events causing the Black Plague and wiping out nearly half of Medieval Europe’s human population. Each new discovery supports what MaKshya Tolbert already shows through her debut poetry collection, Shade is a Place. Everything in our world is connected to the trees on which we all rely, from the wide-range disasters to the quiet connections whispering through our own mycelium, as Tolbert writes in “Failed eulogy”:
I wanted to say too much
I mistook trees’ lives
for what I had to give
So much wanted language
I was so much I did not expect knots
I thought trees would bring
me steady entanglements
MaKshya Tolbert is a poet and artist in Charlottesville, Virginia where they are the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. They have received support for their art from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, and Cave Canem. Their poetry has been published recently in Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and other places. Shade is a Place is their first full-length poetry collection.