All Reviews

In their third collection, Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish (The Year of the Femme) grieves their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, and celebrates their love and life together—the good and the bad. These poems are raw and reaching, often addressed directly to Caldwell. They pulse with ongoing loss, as memory by memory, day by day, Donish is confronted with the fact of their beloved’s death, and their continuing love for her. 

Several poems begin with the line, “In my next life,” acknowledging how grief reforges the world of those left behind. Donish seems to reach for that remade world not only by looking back into the painful, tender memories of a shared queer life, but also by insisting on Caldwell’s continued relevance and presence. “I don’t know // if it’s then or now / anymore. If you’re here / or already gone” they write in “Agate Beach, Lopez Island.”

The centerpiece of the collection, “Kelly in Violet” is a palimpsest of The History of Violets by Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio; some traces of the source text remain in gray. This piece is rich in imagery, overflowing with the daily challenge of living, particularly with grief and mental illness. The urgency and directness of loss haunts even the most beautiful lines: “The butterflies want you back, the hawks want you back, the moon is pining.”

Donish rejects simple notions of time and loss, and instead writes into queer time and grief time, heavy with ghosts and rich with possibility. “Yet isn’t it a mistake / to say I know our story now? Isn’t that the thing? // I don’t believe in dying / fixing—stilling—anything.” This is an openhearted and devastating collection—proof that love stories do not end, but rather go on changing, even through death.

In his 17th book of poetry, Scattered Snows, to the North, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips gazes both inward and outward. His work carries a signature heft, a musicality and syntax that seems to rewrite itself with each read. Phillips tangles his sentences like few other poets working today, and often, rather than untangling them, he lets the tangles linger, clause-heavy and potent, wordy but exacting. The knots he makes with lines, stanzas, images and always-startling juxtaposition are graceful but not easy. One of the distinct pleasures of reading his work is getting lost in the questions it poses, and Scattered Snows, to the North is full of questions.

The speaker of “Searchlights” embodies the contradictions at the heart of this work: “I can see the words, though I can’t / hear them, finding shape first, then meaning, the way smoke does, / Don’t, which is not a question; then just the smell of the rain, which is.” How does the memory of a relationship, or a place, or a particular moment reshape it? Can the present change the past? Why do we fixate on memory, rework the contours of a life over and over again in the mind? What changes as we age, and how do we reckon with what doesn’t? These questions hum through the poems, surfacing and retreating. Always, Phillips engages with them at a slant: “Why not call it love— // each gesture—if it does love’s work? I pulled him / closer. I kissed his mouth, its anger, its blue confusion.”

Phillips beautifully articulates the thorny conflict between reflecting on and being present in: reflecting on time passing while being present in your body; reflecting on the cyclical sameness of human history while being present in the specific ecstasy of a season, a love, a quarrel, the beach at night. The settings of these poems often feel mythological—fields and forests—but they also feel distinctly current. Nature is everywhere, and always changing; there are animals in various stages of life, the turbulent sea, weather, light.

The titular poem, “Scattered Snows, to the North,” is a poignant meditation on loss both intimate and universal. In considering the people who lived during the failing years of the Roman Empire, the speaker muses: “If it was night, they lit / fires, presumably. Tears / were tears.” In “Stop Shaking,” Phillips asks, “What if memory’s just the dead, flourishing differently from how they flourished alive?” Over and over the poems echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.

Dedicated to those “Who Wrestle With God,” The Invention of the Darling by Li-Young Lee utilizes familiar language and religious motifs to depict a sprawling yet personal approach to the sacred. Lee, the son of a political exile turned Presbyterian minister, previously penned six celebrated poetry collections, many of which ruminate on memories of family and love with religious undercurrents. In The Invention of the Darling, Lee’s retrospective writing goes further, seemingly recollecting the inception of life itself.

Many poems in this collection position parents as both sign and symbol of the creator. The epic poem “The Herald’s Wand” explores various manifestations of this almighty deity, alluding to the serpents of Norse, Greek and Christian mythologies. Through the voice of a speaker that seems to hover omnisciently, Lee establishes, “Before / the serpent was a serpent / she was my mother” and “Before the serpent was a serpent / he was my father.” Over the course of the poem, these mutable metaphors continue to link parents to God. At its conclusive section, aptly labeled “Axis Mundi,” readers are left with the bones of the Jörmungandr-like serpent at the base of an Yggdrasil-like tree. In Lee’s world, the death of a parent is the death of a god, an apocalypse. The speaker describes the hope, the terror and the devastation of three beings who witnessed the death of the parent-god-serpent before reaching out to the reader with the final lines: “Of those three, which one were you? / Whether or not you remember, you were there.” This is what Lee does so masterfully: balance the grandest revelations of the universe with the gentle touch of personal memory.

While the collection explores love as expressed through grief, it also champions love expressed through awe, intimacy and worship. Countering the image of the earthbound serpent, Lee celebrates the glory of the hummingbird in the ecstatic “O, Hummingbird, Don’t Go,” and the sensual “Met and Unmet.” The ultimate image of the collection is one of hope. At the end of the titular “The Invention of the Darling,” the speaker realizes that “I thought I’d lost my mother. / It was I who was lost. / Here she is, a pure vibration / across two bridges.” This resonating image finds harmony between the many dialectics presented throughout the work: snake and bird, child and parent, ground and sky, earth and heaven, living and dead, the personal and the prophetic.

The Invention of the Darling relishes in the language and structures of religion, sanctifying parent-child relationships to depict the scale of the grief of parental loss.

Fresh on the heels of his debut collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is a dispatch from Gaza and a call for peace while there is still time to save his people. Abu Toha’s poems describe life in Gaza before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and the result is a harrowing but powerful account of surviving a genocide.

Forest of Noise begins with a tribute to several childhoods: those of Gazan children currently living under constant bombardment, and of Abu Toha himself, who recalls seeing a helicopter shooting a rocket into a building at 7 years old. The rest of the collection performs a similar act,  looking back while recounting the atrocities of the present and, at times, offering glimpses of an unknown and potentially catastrophic future. In “A Request,” written in response to a poem by the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, Abu Toha hopes for a “clean death,” one where he is not buried under rubble or disfigured by shrapnel, and where the clothes in his closet remain intact for his burial. Other “after” poems, like “After Allen Ginsburg” and “Who Has Seen the Wind [after Bob Kaufman]” rewrite the chaos of other turbulent historical moments in an attempt to make sense of the present. And yet, there are pockets of stillness and quiet reflection. In “Palestinian Village,” the speaker reclines in a peaceful town without conflict. The scene is beautiful, but the idyll is fleeting. By the collection’s final poem, “This is Not a Poem,” imagery collapses in a litany of dismembered limbs. “This is a grave,” writes Abu Toha, “not / beneath the soil of Homeland, / but above a flat, light white / rag of paper.”  

Forest of Noise is a difficult but necessary read. As good poetry often does, these poems will keep you up at night and will require you to ask some of the most difficult questions of our time: What kind of world are we living in? What kind of world are we leaving to the children?