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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.