I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, by Taylor Byas, reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson

The idea of home elicits different feelings for people and often involves looking at the past. Sometimes it conjures an image of an old bedroom or familiar faces. In her debut full-length collection, Byas draws inspiration from The Wiz and continually expands on this act of returning home. The speaker recalls specific instances in their childhood, but sometimes, it feels impossible to return to that exact state of mind. I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is a poetry collection that transcends the typical concept of coming home. Taylor Byas solidifies her love of Chicago while giving the reader other feelings to reckon with in her work. Whether it is love, healing, or an ache that is not quite quelled with home, she crafts a journey that makes room for the reader while keeping her personal experiences at the center.

This collection is a masterclass on the modernization of forms. The sonnets, sestinas, and multiple-section poems have an intentional quick pace that prevents them from becoming static or archaic. Within these standard forms are references to popular culture that immediately capture the reader’s attention as seen in “Jeopardy! (The Category Is Birthright)” (11–13). Using the game show as a poem format not only raises the stakes for the questions the speaker is asking but also expands on the process of trying to find answers outside of yourself. The poem immediately asks when inheritance begins and one of the stand-out answers is in lines 9-11:

What is: when her memory of that pain becomes
                        my first heirloom, scrubbed clean
                        from her body’s memory

This image of inheriting her mother’s pain is something many readers can identify with. The poem is so intriguing because it does not stop at this moment. Using five game show clues she touches on the impact of her mother’s pain, her father’s traits, and how this impacts not only her actions but the trajectory her life is on. 

There are many extended images throughout the collection that shine because of Byas’s careful precision and set-up. This is seen in the continuation of each “South Side'' poem, capturing as much of her hometown as possible, and also in other pieces, enhancing specific locations. In “The Gathering Place—Grandma’s House” (21–22), image descriptions help solidify an important figure in the speaker’s life. In two sections, the speaker covers the transition from childhood to adulthood. The second stanza creates a moment of pause and awe:

                Her bedsheets aqua
                blue, an ocean of satin
                shared with her swollen
                limbs. We slept curled on our sides—
                a tight line of small cashews. (6-10)

Describing sleeping beside her family members on her grandma’s blue sheets takes on more weight with Byas’s imagery and stark line breaks. The reader could spend so long mulling over “satin” or “swollen” before envisioning children gathered at a sacred meeting place. This piece feels significant because the grandmother and her domain are brought up in other pieces in the collection. The reader grasps the importance of her presence. 

Even though there is a heavy emphasis on memory and discovery, Byas makes sure the reader doesn’t get trapped in the past. She accomplishes this by highlighting distinctive memories and how they changed her perspective. The most clear example of this is in “Don’t Go Getting Nostalgic” (60). The speaker is rummaging through her old belongings and comes to realize how many different interpretations of herself exist: 

… A 
version of me that still believes that loving you was enough, that wanting things to work would make it so. … (6-8)

Whether it’s through letters to herself or a special someone, the speaker realizes how much she has transformed over time. Byas continues to pull on this thread of self-discovery to examine what we inherit from the people and environment around us. 

While on this journey returning home, there is an overarching theme of healing as a continual process. The poems allude to the difficulty of and the desire for healing in different parts of the speaker’s life—at times in the form of untangling her relationship with her father and other times in recounting fleeting moments of love with significant others. Through all the questioning and excavating is a sense of trying to piece together what healing means for the individual. This act of drawing connections is prevalent in “After the Car Accident” (79). These thoughts are reginited after hitting a parked car:

                … ; if no one
                saw me hit the car, did I do it? If my father never apolo-
                gized on our old phone calls, did he truly wound me? … (16-18)


The memories flood in as the speaker tries to get a grip on the accident. What seems rhetorical becomes very real for her at this moment. 

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is a collection inspired by recollection and relics across the speaker’s lifetime. From game shows to The Wiz, these poems traverse through memories and aspirations for growth with ease. Against the backdrop of home, Byas examines the pieces of her life without trying to force them to fit. This book demonstrates how returning to these places or thoughts is vital work but doesn’t necessarily reveal a clear path forward. The path of returning home is constantly changing and unfolding.

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas, published by Soft Skull Press, August 2023. 128 pages.

Rebecca Samuelson is a Bay Area poet from Hayward, California who writes from the intersection of caretaking and grief. She received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in poetry, from Saint Mary’s College of California. She received a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from San Francisco State University. Her work can be found at rebecca-samuelson.com.

 Socials: @originalstatement on Instagram and @ostatement on Twitter

I Do Everything I’m Told

I Do Everything I’m Told, by Megan Fernandes, reviewed by Trevor Ruth

One of the most difficult things for the modern poet is trying to capture that balance between form and language. Do you care more about poetic structure, cadence, style, or are you looking for something that speaks more to experimentation and the social issues of today (there is no right answer by the way)? I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes meets its audience in the metaphorical median: employing traditional lyrical approaches with a much more modern flair. Oftentimes, this works; other times, the poetry is overly ambitious, though not without its merits. 

The collection starts off with the brilliant “Tired of Love Poems,” which ironically asserts that human action alone is an act of love and, by definition, any poem that chooses to portray an action is secretly a love poem, “To pull/out a chair is more than manners.” Thusly, the poem becomes a love poem through action alone. The book then leaps into “Letter to a Young Poet,” a hugely personal prose poem full of genuine self-imposing advice, along with very subtle social criticism peppered in: “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you,” and “Go slow. Wellness is a myth and shame transforms no one…You can walk off most anything.” The imagery conjured in this piece is one-directional and nostalgic. There’s something that speaks to a turn of the century (possibly millennial) mindset, typically through pop culture references: “Flow is best understood through Islamic mysticism or Lil Wayne spitting without a rhyme book, post-2003.” Such allusions will certainly speak to a younger audience of readers. It is also one of the strongest poems in the collection, apart from the cliché in the final lines that contradicts the otherwise depreciative tone. 

A good portion of the collection is written in either unrhymed couplet or triplet stanzas; however, every so often there will come a sonnet (and, just as often, Fernandes conveniently inserts the word sonnet into the title to let you know that it is indeed a sonnet). Particular to these divergences are “Sonnet for the Unbearable” with its masterful use of assonance, “knelt at a grave/with grass unkempt and overstayed, and still/no spook came. It was a game.” The poem is also a tender one—as its namesake suggests—as it takes the form of an ode to barren women with a heavy dose of gothic imagery intertwined. Another ode comes in the form of a beautifully rendered visual poem depicting an Arizona landscape in “Phoenix” with its surreal balance between the rustic desert imagery and how it impresses itself on the mind of the reader; “Can a rock have a follower? Can a low desert sky/ follow me home? I start a cult of geographies/ of the extremes and stick microphones into cacti arms.”

The second part of the collection, entitled “Sonnets of the False Beloveds with One Exception or Repetition Compulsion,” is incredibly endearing. Here, Fernandes shares a collection of sonnets—each based on a different location—by displaying the sonnet on one page and an erasure of that same sonnet on the following page. Normally, I am not a fan of erasures, however I cannot help but feel inspired by Fernandes’ ability to search for a different kind of meaning by cutting out entire portions of her own poetry, sometimes to great effect: “how to raise a child/underwater/first in/disappointment.” This second section concludes with a foray into the abstract as each word of each erasure is thrown across two entire pages, preceded by the same poem in lyrical fashion in an enormous messy parody of structuralist poetry, but with varying nodes of connecting sentence fragments to consider. In this way, Fernandes seems to show appreciation for classical poetic structure, but also chooses to make fun of it by revolting against the general conventions.

Other times, the poetry seems to wane a bit in its balance of form and substance. For example, “Fuckboy Villanelle,” is not really a successful villanelle in that the refrains are totally reworded, but I appreciate the effort. “Dinner with Jack” takes a conversation between the speaker and a friend (presumably) about a hypothetical situation that recalls the plot to the 2003 film Open Water but stands as a metaphor for the absurdity that self-destructive couples go through, along with a quick name-drop to Samuel Beckett, who seems to appear to make the conversation appear more highbrow in its tone. Fernandes takes every opportunity to pay respect to past poets, including Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke. Mostly these are done in a similar name-dropping fashion and less of an ode to each poet. Not to criticize Fernandes for her taste in poets (far from it, each of the names mentioned are brilliant), but recalling these names came off as deeply confusing. 

Conversely, in what is possibly my favorite poem in the collection, “Rilke,” the speaker examines the very present intellectual dichotomies between Eurydice and Orpheus, and Fernandes gives us two of the most penetrating stanzas in the entire book: “See, I think Orpheus knew. Had always planned to turn back/and homegirl knew, too./That’s a kind of smart./To know what you know./To know what your man can and will do.” It starts with the introduction of what would later be defined as “dumb joy” by the speaker before referring to Eurydice as “homegirl” to give the language that modern edge, then it leaps to the inclusion of seemingly reversed Platonic ideologies and then the poem just keeps it going with more assonance, a bit of rhyme and a dash of dagger-sharp confidence: “What mama energy, one student said/ and I gave her a C. Baby, I’m Circe./I hold down the island./I don’t drown my own men in the sea./I tidy up the underworld…” All of this building up to a climactic finish in the form of an epic stanza followed by the refrain of a single line: “I know how to turn around./I know who waits in this clockless eternity/and who is allowed to drown.”

This spirit of rebellion remains a central theme for the collection. In the final lines of the title poem, “I Do Everything I’m Told,” the speaker examines the relationship between the subject and her boyfriend while noting a photograph of the boyfriend’s hands full of dead animals (the boyfriend is a chef). “I nod at their dead beauty,/put on a playlist called/I do everything I’m told, and can’t tell/what is kink or worship or both.” What better defines the tone for this book, then, but the conscientious blurring of the lines between kink and worship? Admittedly, it comes off as mildly hypocritical, but the book seems to carry its hypocrisies with a kind of self-indulgence: “Fuckboy Villanelle” is not a traditional villanelle; “Paris Poem Without Cliches” is riddled with cliches as far as language is concerned; the first poem in the collection is entitled “Tired of Love Poems” while the last poem in the collection is entitled “Love Poem”. 

The entire book seems to endlessly contradict itself, but perhaps this is the point of the book. Note the sarcasm in the title, I Do Everything I’m Told. This can be seen on an academic (and quite possibly social) level, as if to say, “I do everything I’m told to do as a poet,” as one who practices a higher art form such as poetry, by employing classical poetic structure. Except Fernandes chooses to mock the conventions of classical poetry while also respecting their intricacies by giving each poem that distinctive modern touch to make the poetry exciting and unpredictable. On a technical level, Fernandes succeeds in doing just that; however, there lies beneath the surface that spirit of anarchy that ventures to break the mold and, in doing so, carries itself with a kind of pride and insubordination that one might consider perfectly balanced.

I Do Everything I’m Told, by Megan Fernandes. Tin House, 2023.

Trevor Ruth is a writer originally from Livermore, California. He has been featured in Occam’s Razor, takahe, The Specter Review, The Typeslash Review, Typishly, Wingless Dreamer and Quiet Lightning among other publications. He has a degree from California State University, East Bay and is featured regularly on The Baram House as a Film Reviewer in Residence. He also has a personal blog at https://trevorruthblog.wordpress.com .

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You by Adèle Barclay, reviewed by Mahy Arafa

If you choose to read Canadian author Adèle Barclay’s debut collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, prepare yourself for a journey back in time inspired by the supernatural, the occult, witchcraft, tarot cards, and Canadiana and Americana mythology, combined with intimacy, love, desire, and closeness. In her first poem, “Dear Sara,” the poet asks “Where are our time machines?” This question primes the readers for the poems that follow which act as a time machine, jumping through time and space. For instance, in her first two poems she deftly moves from “slick jaws/of Brooklyn” to small-town Ontario, where “a grunge trio’s name/references Alice Munro.” Barclay’s specific references give the reader a sense of familiarity amidst the travels through time and place. Barclay also plays with time within a single poem. For instance, the five parts of “Dear Sara,” span several generations to highlight the struggles of each time period.

In an interview with The Fiddlehead Magazine, Barclay explains, “My approach to tone in prose is heavily influenced by my impulses as a poet: a mood, feeling, or ineffable idea drives me to gather a collection of objects, sensory experiences, and cultural references to circle around it. I need to be able to see and smell and touch the world I'm writing about.” In other words, she writes with the intent to defy her expectations, following instinct and impulse rather than fixed forms and structures. A prime example is the poem “Testament Scratched into a Water Station Barrel by Eduardo C. Corral.” The line breaks are unpredictable and each line makes unintuitive yet fascinating connections. “The faucet/is a siren, the pipes freeze a rusted melody,” followed by “I’ve/turned Saturn/in my mouth/like an olive pit” are great instances in which the reader’s expectations are altered. It's almost as if Barclay is a witch performing magic and revealing to her disciple (reader) the trick step by step (line by line).

The materialistic and sensory elements that inspire Barclay are evident in her collection. In speaking of her writing process with Open Book Magazine, Barclay says: “I don't plan out poems, and I definitely do write from an intuitive place. Sometimes poems swerve in directions I didn't anticipate. And yet I often feel like a lot of these things exist as ideas or even sensations that are percolating or ambiently swirling around in my poet brain. The writing distills them.” This surprising, sensory imagery is especially prominent in “Suburban Sonnet,” a free-verse poem with a frenzied form and a piling of adjectives and comparisons. Barclay’s metaphors are unexpected and beautiful: “drunk as a busted patio umbrella blackberry/barbs the crank of old bike chains up anthills;” “silver creeks swallowed the highway’s shoulder;” and “hive-mind engines hum in the shallow of the night.”

The poem “Dear Sara II” is a remarkable piece in which all of Barclay’s techniques and themes intersect: 

Dear Sara II 

The witches of Bushwick ward off night 

  terrors 

with warming spells, 72 Fahrenheit 

in November. You frown and sleep 

for days in my borrowed room. I circle the 

  bed 

with diatomaceous earth, fill three cups 

with water, 

plait my black hair. We hang at a rabbit 

  hole 

in the West Village, mirror Schiele— 

twisted knuckles seize a dark aura, flecks 

  of silver 

in the skirt. MoMA PS1 makes you hate art 

and give up smoking. Fish heart, bones 

within bones, hangnails and turmeric. 

I wrap my right arm around your belly

and swat our nightmares with my left. 

Sara, nothing like ambition or sanity 

  matters 

because at Saint John the Divine 

phoenixes baptized in rust swoop 

from the cathedral’s ceiling. 

The beasts stopped a whole city block 

for a week last winter. Priests carted scrap 

  metal 

off trucks and hoisted them up, 

engineers determined how to best salvage 

the holy arches from added weight, 

and leashed tigers paraded in to pray 

under the great hall’s open lungs.

With the indented, one word lines, Barclay creates a disrupted form that embodies the chaos of time. That being said, Barclay includes details that help guide the reader through the chaos. The poet speaker mentions MoMA PS1 to indicate a time-lapse and November, to mark the season and create a certain coldness. The one-word poetic lines also serve to usurp the reader's expectations, one of Barclay’s favorite techniques. The themes of religion, witchcraft, and the occult are prevalent throughout this poem with the imagery of cathedrals, baptism, priests, holiness, witches, nightmares, fish hearts, and bones. Barclay’s poetry desperately attempts to connect with the reader over distances while embracing ambiguity and encrypted messages in need of deciphering. Indeed, the young poet confesses to Open Book Magazine, “I'm not too interested in the reader needing to understand the private language of the epistolary mode in order to engage with the poem—just like I'm not concerned about trying to decipher or unlock a poem in general. The mystery is part of the magic. What's compelling to me about the epistolary mode is the heat released with this merging of feeling and form.”  

Though Barclay thrusts the reader into different places and time periods, she grounds each poem with concrete indicators of the geographic location and time in history. The title of the collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, informs our reading of these poems: in each distinct setting, the poet speaker is willing to reach out with all their strength to connect to humanity, even if restricted by a cage. The humorous voice of the narrator is relatable and familiar, almost like talking to someone you know well. Through the reverence and mystique of her lively descriptions, Barclay creates the illusion of traveling back in time while diving into themes of millennial anxieties and magic.

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You by Adèle Barclay

Nightwood Editions. 2017. 96 pages

Mahy Arafa is a passionate, career-driven individual currently studying at Sheridan College to receive her Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing and Publishing. She is currently working as a German transcriber for an AI company, and she makes a living as a book reviewer. She has been a passionate and aspiring writer and editor since childhood and possesses a complete portfolio of projects including non-fiction, prose fiction, drama, and poetry. She has worked as a transcriber, blog writer, editor, and content writer, but her lifelong dream is to write a script for a feature film, tv show, or video game, to direct and produce it herself, and to write a successful novel, book, or collection of poems.

The Hurting Kind

Adjusting Your Vision: The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson

Ada Limón could teach a masterclass on crafting a deliberate cascading between life and death. In her latest collection, remnants of searching through grief with memory topple over every corner. The Hurting Kind deciphers meaning by documenting ways we survive, memorialize, and recount to shape our perspectives of the world.

The collection is divided into four sections named after the seasons. It seems no coincidence that the text begins with “Spring.” Images and thoughts spring forth to put the reader in a reflective trance. Whether the speaker is observing birds while on vacation or thinking about a fox’s steps, there is always layered meaning. An example of this duplicity of meaning is seen in “In the Shadow” (9):

                It is what we do in order to care for things, make them
                ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. (9-10)

These lines allude to the act of making things “our own” to understand their role in our lives. This complex thought arises in a poem that begins with describing a wild pansy. The longer the speaker discusses the flower, the deeper meaning is created. She shifts from taking note of the flower’s colors to questioning why she can’t just enjoy the flower for what it is.

As the collection continues, the content shifts in a way that remains consistent with Limón’s poetics. Just when you get into a groove of watching the trees blowing in the wind, specific street names are thrown in to alter your geography. Between these ruminations on natural life unfolding around her, she includes capsules of family memories. This documentation never becomes listless due to the variations in form. Limón shifts from prose poems to contained left-justified pieces, which creates different textures. Not only can you separate each family member, but you can visually see their differences on the page. In “Joint Custody” (40), the line breaks help the reader recognize the limitations of hindsight in lines 7-9:

                …I cannot reverse it, the record

                scratched and stopping to that original
                chaotic track…

The speaker develops an appreciation for the two family dynamics without erasing the difficulty that accompanies those memories. She arrives at her own level of understanding that isn’t quite reverent. Her family situation is something many readers can identify with. There is time and space to reflect but these memories shouldn’t prevent you from moving forward. You have to move beyond the record scratches. 

Along with shifts in form, Limón also employs alliteration and repetition throughout the collection. This forces you to slow down, which makes the trail of questioning easier to follow. It also heightens specific details and the power of naming. This is made most apparent in “Calling Things What They Are” (47). Even with such a definitive title, the piece still moves throughout multiple memories alluding to the fact that a memory can pop up at any time. The piece starts with observing a bird feeder and how birds were not that interesting to her before. It then shifts into recalling a past relationship and how that relationship left the speaker deflated. The ultimate moment of clarity is achieved at the end of the poem (16-17):

                …I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny
                that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

The drawn out lines moving between images in this prose poem allow this revelation to have tremendous power. 

A sense of stillness and introspection is created by the final section “Winter.” By the time you reach the title poem, a genuine connection to society has been created. While taking you on a journey through her memories and grief, Limón arrives at a collective grief. What has unfolded the past few years is apparent in the haziness that covers nearly every single piece. “The Hurting Kind” (78-85) recounts memory and myth in a way that often intertwines when recalling family history. These sections move quickly because of the purposeful use of blank space amidst shifting line lengths. This allows spotlights on strong sections like lines 108-110:

                I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
                        from a long line of weepers.

                I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

The “I” has the most strength in this section because it becomes a mirror for everyone. Whether you physically express your grief or can recognize it in loved ones who have passed away, this act of searching amongst the pain is a common practice. 

The book closes with a piece aptly titled “The End of Poetry” (95). There is an emphasis, almost a responsibility, to have altered ways of seeing by the end. Limón points out this combination of hope and exasperation in lines 7-8:

                enough of the will to go on and not go on or how

                a certain light does a certain thing, enough…

The Hurting Kind as a whole represents a category that we have all seeped into. It demonstrates that we have the power to determine how memory and grief will shape our vision for the future.

The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, published by Milkweed Editions, May 2022. 120 pages.

Rebecca Samuelson is a Bay Area poet from Hayward, California who writes from the intersection of caretaking and grief. She received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in poetry, from Saint Mary’s College of California. She received a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from San Francisco State University. Her work can be found at rebecca-samuelson.com.

Socials: @originalstatement on Instagram and @ostatement on Twitter

Husbandry

Husbandry by Matthew Dickman (reviewed by Alex Russell)

Matthew Dickman’s newest book of poems, Husbandry, focuses on parenthood. His poetry does not mince words – thematically, his intentions are clear; syntactically, there are no clumsy echoes. Everything is right there, visible and clear.

As a single parent with two young sons, the author’s world – as revealed in his poems – often revolves around everyday life. We see him folding clothes, cleaning dishes, and cooking food. In sparse yet precise language, he presents everything – from the monumental to the mundane -- with due diligence and a measure of concerned distance.

Most of the poems in Husbandry follow an established structure. Each stanza is made up of two short lines, making up a careful-sounding dialogue. After a while, the deliberate weight of each word becomes a signpost along a varied, expansive, living path.

Many pieces include conversations he has had with his sons. “Crossing Guard” is one such series of moments between a father and son as the two talk about lost friends. Without romanticizing it, being overly sentimental or trivializing it, death is a subject that is evenly threaded throughout each stanza. As the two talk about absent friends, the pair finds a dead animal in the road.

“For a moment I think / we will be standing / here forever, he and I / watching death / do its slow work / like someone restoring / a painting / but in reverse.” 

It is this kind of soft dissection of death – this large and all-encompassing thing – where Dickman finds his power. Part of this skill rests in the author taking his time with the experiences and ideas he wants to discuss; in a thought-out and patient manner, he lays everything out for the reader. 

Plain language does not equate to simplistic thinking and Dickman’s poetry is a testament to this. In a piece titled “Father,” he delves into the significance of names: 

“Fathers with names / like Joseph, / Yosef, Josiah, Yasef, / meaning he will add…Fathers with names / like Ernie, Ernest, Ernesto, / Arnošt, meaning kindness.” With an almost stoic grace, Dickman ponders little asides like this – taking in minute complexities and the interconnectedness of language, human culture and thought – without ever making it feel like stalling for time or senseless, aesthetic meandering.

“Father” ends with a bittersweet but crucial realization on the author’s part: “I know / there are / really three children / in the story of my life. / I must make a home / for each of them.”

It’s true that many sons become fathers, but Dickman goes several steps further to illustrate a kind of fluid, revolving continuum. Three short stanzas reveal something tender and real at his core both as a writer and human being.

The poem ends without any huge reveal or twist; there is nothing prefabricated or resupplied for cheap emotional string-pulling. “I must make a home / for each of them” is an instance of pure personal reflection. Here, Dickman balances out both the internal and external aspects of his life and, in a broader sense, human nature.

Taking into account his naked fears, anxieties, and his myriad responsibilities as a father, many poems in the book – without spelling it out – attempt to arrive at some pertinent balance. 

To find consistent harmony, in writing as in life, everything must be appraised. Thankfully, in Dickman’s writing, nothing is too big or too small to feature in his gorgeous, elegiac writing.

In “Lilac,” he savors “that amazing lemon / frosted lemon cake” from Starbucks, while he holds his youngest son and listens to “his body living, / alive outside / his mother’s body, and the lilac / outside on the street, outside / everyone, and heavy in the rain.”

As these stanzas make their way down the page, their tone is one of patience and resilience, and free of any ego. They move from a casual scene inside a Starbucks to the weight of the external world, always in flux.

Even though certain poems may seem to go off on tangents, Husbandry is to poetry what Dark Side of the Moon is to rock and roll; every aspect fits into a natural progression of thought and feeling. Interspersed throughout the book are prose pieces, two-lines at most, highlighting his sons Hamza and Owen and their individual reactions to their parents’ separation as well as their own burgeoning journeys in life.

Dickman’s writing is supremely candid about all things – separation from his wife is no exception to this. At times unabashedly pointed, at others frank and forgiving, the separation, in literary or thematic terms, could be considered a major inciting event in Husbandry.

More so than in actual, physical terms, what the separation took to mean for Dickman is a constant work-in-progress; a reappraisal of himself, Matthew Dickman – adult, writer, father, son, friend, lover. 

In “Parenting and Virginia Woolf,” beautifully and bluntly, Dickman writes: “For weeks after / the separation really / kind people kept / telling me that I was / on a journey, this is / your journey / they would say / and I would want to / scoop out their / eyeballs with one / of my grandmother’s / silver grapefruit / spoons.” Spiteful? Maybe. But entirely human and universal. 

Like the book as a whole, “Parenting and Virginia Woolf” takes time to develop, examine, exist in, and finally outgrow, the author’s individual, private hurt. “I am not on a journey, / I am cooking / dinner for my kids. / I am washing their / hair and underwear, / I am trying to go / for walks outside, / trying to eat more vegetables.” Not a journey, but a process.

A lot of the time, while reading Husbandry, it was hard to keep going. Dickman’s writing is “raw” – not in the sense of something unfinished, because his poems are as complete as diamonds, but in the way that exposed flesh will be red and sensitive to everything, even light.

In the end, it’s this sensitivity that, no matter how close he cuts to home, makes one return to his writing. There is something fulfilling and wonderful in being able to meet pain and vulnerability on level footing. Poetry, it seems, is Matthew Dickman’s way of doing just that.

Near the end of Husbandry, Dickman reflects in “Anniversary” how “The night isn’t as long / a year later, or bullied or rootless or night at all.” As painful as it often is, growth is still growth – eventually making us a little wiser, if not stronger.

Husbandry by Matthew Dickman, published in 2022 by W. W. Norton & Company. 142 pages.

Alex Russell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Mason University and now works in the field of journalism and publishing. He has contributed poetry to a variety of literary magazines and art journals, such as The Elevation Review, 300 Days of Sun, and The Ignatian Literary Magazine. His contributions to the Falls Church News-Press, a locally owned newspaper in the Washington, DC area, can be found online at fcnp.com.