A LIFE CYCLE

An intimate collection of poems traces a painful journey from trauma to healing to love.

In the Q&A section at the end of this volume, Asherah reveals that the preceding cycle of poems was written in response to a sexual assault that triggered memories of childhood trauma. The resulting poetry eschews graphic depictions of harrowing events in favor of gentle exploration of the resulting sadness, grief, and mistrust that the speaker experienced. “What if you are only ever to be yourself in pieces?” is the question that launches her path toward recovery. This journey is divided into four sections, each composed of short, mostly untitled poems. “The Shattering” confronts “The broken pieces / Scraping at my open heart.” This section also addresses methods of survival: “And I can deal with individual losses, / I learned to never put all my weight on one leg.” “The Healing” similarly focuses on the symbiosis of damage and recovery: “Sometimes the heaviness is there / To keep you from floating a w a y.” One of the few titled works, “A Woman’s Bones Are of the Earth,” effectively grounds the entire collection in women’s lived experience: “If we did not learn how to tend to wounds / We would never have been able to survive.” The third section, “Light Shines Through,” is a fierce affirmation of life, as the speaker proclaims, “I’ve broken into my version of a masterpiece,” and describes other people as “an explosion of renewable fuel.” The last section, “Loving,” is a celebration of the heady and excruciating passions of a newfound romantic love. In showing how her speaker was profoundly moved by a relationship with another woman, Asherah is both an articulate romantic (“No one had ever held such curiosity / For the small ponderings in my head”) and a skillful dissector of feelings: “I don’t even know if it’s her I want, / Or just the feelings she brought out in me.” It’s the poet’s refusal to simplify the contradictory web of human existence that gives this book its power.

A compassionate and accessible poetry cycle about loving oneself in the aftermath of violation.