STRONG HEART

Anselment presents intimately scaled poems about a woman’s everyday life.

This debut poetry collection highlights existential musings sparked by the minutiae of quotidian life, including gardening, medical appointments, rejection emails, the news, the weather, glimpsing a stranger’s tattoo, applying sunscreen, and the tasks of motherhood. The 75 poems range in length from just four lines to 2 1/2 pages and are grouped into nine loosely thematic sections. Part 1 contains just three melancholy poems (one a single sentence) about hearing an owl’s call in the early morning. Part 2 features poems dealing with sensitivity, anxiety, rejection, and traumatic medical experiences related to the author’s chronic heart condition. Several of these personify the heart as a separate individual: “I don’t know how to make her, my heart, stop worrying. / I don’t know how to grow thick skin.” Others describe the fear and dismay provoked by the Pulse nightclub mass shooting and the sighting of a man’s swastika tattoo in a grocery store parking lot in east Texas, where Anselment lives. Part 3 includes poems titled “Appointment,” “Doom Scrolling,” “Hovering and Apologizing,” and “Lunch,” which deals with the dilemma of whether the speaker should postpone a video meeting when a doctor’s running late. Part 4 is titled “Mind your spoons,” an expression common in the disability community that describes managing one’s energy expenditures and reserves. The weather turns cold in Parts 5 and 6, which include pieces such as “Mud Goop Rubber Boot,” “Yuck-Stuff,” “Trail of Splats,” and “Hard Freeze.” These poems share a motif of decay that fertilizes new growth. Parts 7, 8, and 9 expand the theme of messy regrowth, turning outward toward distant friends and seeing details as parts of a bigger picture. The final poem (which gives the book its title) asserts that, “In a world that rewards cruelty, / softness is bold, brave, and daring.”

Anselment’s writing is direct, relatable, and literally down-to-earth in poems such as “Butt in the Mud” and “Knees of My Jeans.” Most of the pieces in the collection are in free verse or prose without defined meter or rhyme, often using repetition, alliteration, and rhythm for poetic effect. The imagery evocatively conveys specific places and times that the poet uses to illuminate broader ideas (such as the cycles of history in “Failing” and the worries about raising a child in a violent world in “It Hasn’t Worked Out”), but the language is often ordinary (“Dampness from the soil soaks into the knees of my jeans, / but I don’t mind”). The insights offered are sound, but not particularly original (“As digitally connected / as we all are today, I feel like / our humanness isn’t as connected / as it once was”). A selection of color images of flowers and a bee taken from the author’s garden photos ornament the section headers, and a two-page preface expresses Anselment’s hope that her work might help others feel less alone.

A sweet and accessible but sometimes-lightweight collection of short poems.