A collection of poems about identity, racial justice, and historical trauma from Rhodes-Ryabchich.

The author’s experiences of marginalization are set out in these poems. The opening poem, “Beyond 21-Century Blues,” celebrates the Civil Rights Movement, specifically the March on Washington. Evoking the excitement of collective action across race, gender, and religion, she writes, “The bus ticket to the ‘CORE Freedom March,’ far / Surpassed a ticket to ride to the moon!” “Why We Can't Discriminate” explores the dehumanization that arises from discrimination, and Rhodes-Ryabchich explores how people are othered—through class, skin color, and values—and how exclusion denies people their shared humanity. The poet also looks at the perseverance of African Americans in “The Creek,” imagining that body of water as a sacred space where the speaker’s ancestors found solace and planned their own liberation: “Here we planned our salvation, dreamed of our escape. / This was my life. The people were mine. / If I could carry you to the creek, I would show you the way to freedom.” She also revisits the Oklahoma City bombing, the Kibeho massacre, and the murder of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police. Upon the death of poet Lucie Brock-Broido, Rhodes-Ryabchich ponders existential questions: “What a strange world we live in. / Here today, then we are only a poem away.” Despite the carnage, suffering, and grief, the poet concludes on a hopeful note, insisting that “amidst all this debris / there has got to be something beautiful— / if there is to be an epiphany.”

A rich variety of themes are covered here, from civil rights and social justice to personal reflections on family and identity, providing readers with a multifaceted take on the human experience. The poet uses visceral imagery in her verse, like this description of her ailing mother: “Inside the small hospital room, / She lies petite like a newborn / Cramped inside a sterile perambulator, / Only limp like a rag doll.” She also deftly applies this sensory-rich language to food in “Poached Eggs” when she writes, “Put the egg on wheat toast / and pop the yellow yolk // Until it drips all over / the bread so hot and thick // Like a melting sun.” Some poems here could certainly be seen as preaching to the choir, like “Ode for the Children Detained at the Border,” which harkens back to Trump’s “zero tolerance” child-separation policies at the U.S.–Mexico border: “Isn’t a child a special person with their own rights? / To life, liberty, freedom and justice for all and then has to die? // Were the eyes of Americans blinded from what is right?” Other poems may be tough for readers to stomach, like one that gives voice to three enslaved women subjected to medical experimentation by Dr. J Marion Sims: “I now have 3 hole in me / be leakin’ out foul fluid.” The collection as a whole is not an easy read, but its raw emotion and activist fervor is undeniable and authoritative throughout.

A powerful, thought-provoking poetry collection about oppression and activism.

Rhodes-Ryabchich confronts the joys and discouragements of adulthood in this collection of poems.

Poetry often has a documentary quality, reading like a recording of the author’s own experiences. As Rhodes-Ryabchich shows in this collection, poetry can also act as a heuristic tool, showing a speaker thinking her way through her place in the world. The book’s first section is arranged around the theme of single motherhood, and Rhodes-Ryabchich employs the sonnet form as a means of constructing an affirmational worldview. The first poem, “Sonnet for a Single Mother With Daughter,” begins, “I wake each day to joy—I am sexy. / Mother is me, full of love and selful. / I see a miniature me so lovely. / I have love to give—I am so grateful.” The mixed forms of the book’s second section ably explore the many different modes of love, from the breathless excitement captured in free verse to recursive, insistent longings embodied in villanelles. “Overture II” captures the emotional thrall of romance, with each line ending in the same sound: “The dawning Friday sun, Comes / In red, furious light, strummed / By magnificent God’s thumb, / Playing songs in the pink Plum / Cumulus clouds, like a hum / Over a warm, baby’s tum.” The third section, a love letter to the world’s many beauties, is an open-hearted series of odes: to paradise, to reeds, to loneliness, to the poet’s own face. The final section dissects the ravages of disease, be they bodily or societal. Poems touch on the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic, police brutality, drug use, and the pitfalls of the American health care system.

Over the course of the collection, the verses vary in terms of quality, and many of the poems have a line to two that don’t land well. In the sonnets, particularly, Rhodes-Ryabchich often leans into the unnatural demands of the form. The inaugural sonnet quoted above, for example, contains the awkward rhymes, “Sometimes I don’t want to be a growncub. / Always I don’t want this to be kill/joy. / I hope your joy can stay in the joyclub. / The red, faint clouds call out to the dreamboy.” The better poems tend to be in free verse, in which the poet seems to revel in the form’s relative lack of constraints, as in the poem “Futuristic Soliloquy”: “I imagine myself to be a healthy peacock / With bright feathers, brilliant / Like neurons, and musically synchronized / To the ping of galaxies, / Radiating in joy, and firing / With billions of star nebulae, / Oozing euphoria deep into space.” Themes of self-love and affirmation pervade the work (one of the sonnets, for instance, is “after Deepak Chopra”), even as the poet grapples with life’s darker and thornier issues. The lines aren’t always virtuosic, but they’re almost always engaging and playful, leaping forward to unexpected references or vibrant images.

A varied and often engaging, if uneven, set of works about such themes as motherhood, self-esteem, and entropy.

Rhodes-Ryabchich’s poetry collection makes room for our pettiest impulses.

The ode, generally speaking, is a form of celebration, a storied poetic form honoring a person, a moment, or some other worthy subject. In her latest group of poems, the author sardonically inverts the ode, turning it into a tool of confession and deconstruction applied to her life’s uglier memories, such as getting called slurs, suffering eating disorders, and a suicide attempt. This is not to say the author has written a dour collection devoid of humor or levity—some pieces are slyly comedic, such as “SELF PORTRAIT AS A PIECE OF TOFU AND AVOCADO,” which includes lines like “I combine well with American cheese and plum tomatoes.” Even these lighter moments reveal their speakers’ desires and anxieties about never achieving greatness: “My biggest fear is that I will spoil, before being enjoyed / by some hungry, health-conscious person.” Many of the poems have the “Ode to” title formulation for hyper-specific subjects including contact lenses and jealous mothers, as well as broader topics, like “kindness.” Rhodes-Ryabchich is fond of long, expository titles (“WHAT I THINK OF THE BABYSITTERS WHO TELL ME THEY WONT’ BABYSIT MY DISABLED CHILD”) that often belie the shrewd perceptions the works contain, be they considerations of ableism, infidelity, racism, or mental-health bias. In these pages, these speakers refuse to bite their tongues.

This is a difficult book to absorb in a single setting due to its near-relentless insistence on the fact that life, frankly, can suck. Many references are made to the author’s disabled daughter, Kyla, and the challenges of raising a wheelchair-using child in an ableist, unforgiving world. It can be hard to parse the silver linings of these open-ended pontifications as they are largely about the gulf between the cards we hope for and the cards life deals us. But this acerbic quality can also be cleansing, especially for readers who have felt sidelined in their own lives. “Kindness” demonstrates that the titular virtue need not be metaphorically reduced to sunshine and soft things—these poems locate grace in places like a child’s hard-won ability to self-regulate their emotions after a tantrum (“I’m watching my daughter grow / and wondering how much of this / she has in her, and why it happens and maybe / it’s better this way— she is expressing her wants / and needs, and this is the way she does it every day”). This is a collection best suited for moments when readers can address their darkest impulses and need a private space to ridicule and pout and complain. The title comes from the Greek term for “turning point,” often employed in tragedies when the protagonist’s fate has been sealed. This book is not so dark and nihilistic as that, but the concept reminds us that we do keep score of our wrongs, archiving those bad memories that “would remain in my mind, a miniature minitour— / deformed and beastly” whether we like it or not.

A confident assortment of poems that give cathartic voice to our worst selves.