A varied and often engaging, if uneven, set of works about such themes as motherhood, self-esteem, and entropy.
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.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2022
ISBN: 9789390601288
Page Count: 81
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Embury’s own works shine brightest in this unevenly executed story of her life.
This fictionalized biography of 19th-century poet, essayist, and protofeminist Emma Embury (1806-1863) highlights her skill and intellect via numerous quotations from her work.
New York City–based writer Embury was the author of many stories and poems, often published in magazines under the pseudonym “Ianthe,” that gained some popularity during her lifetime. As Russell explains in his author’s note, this story of Embury’s life “weaves the facts of her life with imagined accounts of events and conversations,” which allows readers to follow the writer through a precocious and privileged childhood, and through marriage, tragedy, and travel, with a sense of immediacy. It also unambiguously notes Embury’s feminism, showing how she was an early and vocal proponent of women’s education. The work’s fictional elements give a sense of movement to some scenes, which quickens the pace of the work as a whole. That said, much of the dialogue seems stilted and antiquated; the events feel simplified and overly episodic; and too much time is dedicated to describing the fashions of the age—to the degree that, perhaps inadvertently, Embury herself becomes objectified. (Also, inexplicably, a portrait of Embury’s husband, Daniel, is in the book’s frontmatter, but no portrait of the subject herself.) Nonetheless, readers do get valuable insight into Embury’s life as a poet, as a sharp intellect, and as the head of a household; the book also effectively delves into the culture and restrictions of pre–Civil War urban America. The book’s greatest virtue is how it provides generous context to Embury’s poems and essays, many of which are provided in part or in full; indeed, these original sources are more engaging than the biographical elements, more often than not. Despite these shortcomings, Russell deserves credit for seeing the talent in this poet’s work and bringing her words back into the public eye.
Embury’s own works shine brightest in this unevenly executed story of her life.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66980-024-8
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Xlibris US
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A brutally honest and evocative account of anxiety and depression in poetry.
A collection of poetry focuses on mental health struggles.
Marín, who holds a doctorate in African American literature, found inspiration for this book’s title in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story that reminds readers that deep water and drowning are not synonymous. It is an apt metaphor for the poet, who has suffered from anxiety and depression for much of her life. In free-verse poems, she transports readers from her childhood in Málaga, Spain, to the adolescent onset of her symptoms and her challenging adulthood. She methodically unpacks the torment she experienced from the “demon in my mind,” her “tyrant” of a brain, and a “a mob of angry people yelling” in her head. She recalls being told her troubles were all in her head by a doctor whose only solution was Valium. Confessions follow regarding the “mask I wear to chameleon / my way through each day” and how a “list of mistakes I made this past year pile up in my mind like cars.” She examines the frustration of finding the right antidepressant and how she despairs at the drudgery of everyday life. She divulges the difficulties of maintaining a marriage and parenting children while experiencing mental illness. Marín boldly confronts her own and others’ emotions and behaviors. “Mom’s silence claims / its space between the ceiling, floor, / and four walls of every room, enshrouding / the house with a smothering cloak / of unanswered questions,” she writes in “Behind Walls.” Her descriptions are vivid and tactile; a compassionate teacher comforted the author with “arms like a blanket.” Marín poignantly depicts how mental illness feels in lines like “Fear kidnaps my nerves, / ties them with electric wire,” and “I’m tired of the iron ball, / stuck in my throat.” Though she does experiment with a handful of haiku, they don’t always resonate. The poet’s writing excels when it has more room to explore.
A brutally honest and evocative account of anxiety and depression in poetry.Pub Date: June 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73479-868-5
Page Count: 101
Publisher: Legacy Book Press LLC
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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