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Forces by Lisa Stice

March 29, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 122 pgs.
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Forces by Lisa Stice explores the push-and-pull of different forces, desires, and outside drivers can have on our individual lives. From the operational forces of our daily obligations to the gravitational forces of imagination and the magnetic pull of the muse. In the opening poem, “Ritual Hunts,” Stice explores the empty vessel and out need to fill it with something, anything. Do we fill it with junk mail? Does that satisfy us? Or should we fill it with potpourri or fake apples or keys? The poems asks us to examine what we fill our lives with and to be vigilant about what we do fill out lives with. We need to remember that how we fill our lives will go a long way in satisfying our desires and needs and ultimately lead to unrest or contentment.

Ritual Hunts (pg. 3)

Here we have a vessel,
hollowed out and empty
and we squirm in the need
to fill it with wooden apples,
potpourri or junk mail
we will throw away months
from now. Ritual shines
above our design as we crowd
our heads with words, turn
pages in a right to left manner,
read in a left to right manner,
enrich our lives away
and still wait for an established
secret somewhere between lines.
How we always
place the car keys here,
hang the dog's leash near
the door, turn the lights out
at bedtime.

Stice’s poems reflect on the ordinary and create an atmosphere where the calming nature of that life is the centering we need when forces are threatening to derail us. Think of the deliberateness of using the rotary phone – the need to rotate each number one at a time and wait before moving to the next. It becomes a meditation on how to center yourself, remain calm in a storm, and be deliberate in your actions.

In “Lying to Our Daughter,” the narrator has to pack up her home for evacuation from a storm. “Our daughter asks where we are going,/We say we’re going to visit Uncle/Paddy because we want to make this/evacuation feel like a vacation. It’s like/how we never want her to be afraid/even though we know a hurricane/is really just a little storm among many.//” (pg. 48)

These moments of isolated concentration become the mantra for the narrator as she struggles with the chaos of motherhood, military life, and more. Forces by Lisa Stice is an amazing collection that will provide you with a different perspective on the chaos of our lives, particularly when the unexpected keeps you on your toes.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Lisa Stice is a poet/mother/military spouse, the author of three full-length poetry collections, Forces (Middle West Press, 2021), (Permanent Change of Station (Middle West Press, 2018) and Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Desert (Prolific Press, 2018). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee who volunteers as a mentor with the Veterans Writing Project , as Poetry Editor for The Military Spouse Book Review, as Poetry Editor for Inklette Magazine, and as a writer for the Military Spouse Fine Artists Network (Milspo-FAN). She received a BA in English literature from Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University) and an MFA in creative writing and literary arts from the University of Alaska Anchorage. While it is difficult to say where home is, she currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog.

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Granddaughter of Dust by Laura Williams

March 24, 2022 by

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 128 pgs.
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Granddaughter of Dust by Laura Williams explores imagination and reinvention, as Williams takes on iconic characters from fairy tales and literature and enlivens her poems with child-like imagination. The collection opens in that child’s perspective in “‘The Horse Fair,'” in which an observer is in a gallery viewing a painting. “I’m standing in a gallery, sterile, quiet. The horses cannot/stamp off the wall, out of the pigment and into the world.//” (pg. 3) The narrator of this poem is recalling a time when imagination was endless and there was a sense of freedom in that. But by the end of the poem, we know that the sense of wonder and exploration has been hindered by life experience and the narrator wants to return to a time when imagination was a gateway to possibility.

Williams’ poems are imaginative, break with traditional forms and combine a narrative prose within the poem that break up the norm of verse. Many of her poems stretch the meaning of perception and understanding, like in “Drowning,” where the narrator is saved from drowning in the ocean and is fully aware that the saver is “Wary. Watchful. Afraid.” and unable to look at the narrator in the same way. But the pull of the ocean was too much and a need for rest a strong pulling tide. The outside viewer would see the saver as a hero, while the saved here doesn’t view them in that way, especially when they are strapped to the bed.

In these early poems, the ocean, sea, and water are a major component of Williams’ poems. Whether it is the pull of the ocean as a place of rest through drowning or the taste of salt in a narrator’s tears, Williams is exploring that magnetic energy of the ocean — its vastness, its mystery, its a place where darkness resides deep and can be hidden away.

Revolution

The sun burns
if you let
it shine on

you too long.
How long is
too long? Learn

by being burned.
The sun gives
life by shining.

You remember the
burn from the
scars, from the

transformation of being
set aflame and
after somehow surviving.

Williams’ poems are stunning whether she’s speaking about fairy tales like “Red Riding Hood” or “Cinderella” or more personal experiences. A lot of these poems show a different perspective from traditional points of view, and it enables readers to see the effect of their platitudes and kind intentions on those deeply hurting. We often rely on platitudes because we don’t know how to make things better or how to help. Perhaps it is better to just say that we don’t, admit we don’t know everything. Granddaughter of Dust by Laura Williams is a must have poetry collection.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Laura Williams cannot remember a time she did not love to read; her passion for writing came later, but poetry has been her life-long love. The younger middle child of four, she has been blessed with a large, close-knit family. She is in the process of earning her doctorate in education, focusing on adult literacy, at Louisiana State University and lives with two mischievous cats.

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Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden

March 23, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden is an exploration of devastating, sudden loss as it relates to the 2011 Tōhoku magnitude 9-9.1 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan. The disaster caused more than $300 billion in damages and more that 15,000 deaths, and these kinds of large-scale losses are often hard for us to comprehend because of their sheer magnitude, unless we are personally impacted. Eden draws on the mythical signs that nature provides and she cultivates the deep emotional resonance these disasters should evoke from us. She opens the collection with  a “gray” day in which the beach is “covered in whales,” they are “fifty bodies, like tea leaves//at the bottom of a scryer’s glass,/heavy and loud in memorial.//” (Hokotashi City, Ibaraki Prefecture, pg. 3).

We already are called to attention, to attune ourselves to the natural world, to the signs of what comes next. But even preparing ourselves, becoming keen observers will not make us ready enough to be a survivor. How can you explain what it is to survive an ocean that consumed all the land and swept everything away, except for you? It is a cavern of loss that even the greatest climber will struggle to surmount.

In “Corpse Washing,” we’re shown the reverence required of working with the dead, and how much care, listening, and attention to detail it takes to breathe life into the once full of life bodies we mourn and must let go. “I brush the seaweed and trash/from her remaining hair until its soft./I clip the ends of my hair to fill/her empty eyebrows, her missing eyelashes./” And the care that can no longer be given: “The mother takes/the last water to her daughter’s/lips, but the girl rejects it./She’s had more than enough/water for one life.//”

Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden honors those lost to the tsunami and those who were exposed to radiation from Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. While “Shikata ga nai” (nothing can be done about it), Eden seeks to provide emotional touch stones to those losses, honoring not only what was, but what cannot be changed and how the world must and has moved on. What is done, cannot be undone. (said by Lady Macbeth in Shakespear’s Macbeth).

RATING: Cinquain

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Flowers Grow on Broken Walls by Farena Bajwa

March 22, 2022 by

Source: Author Marketing Experts
Paperback, 244 pgs.
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Flowers Grow on Broken Walls by Farena Bajwa is of the Instapoetry variety that are easily read in a short period of time and provide an emotional reaction to broken relationships and the recovery that follows. The collection also includes a series of sketches.

 .... (pg. 11)
As time passed, you started staring more into the space,
our stars were once glowing and before I knew it,
had all died out.
.... (pg.18)
Don't play around when it comes to love.
There is just too much that breaks.
 (pg. 49)
I can't believe you chose a bottle over me.

With the sketches and the verses in these beginning sections, you can see the social media-likeability of these poems from Bajwa’s words. Emotional poems do well online, connecting readers and poets, especially when they have dealt with breakups and other issues. What I loved about this collection was the sketches. I wanted to see more of those and I wanted them to be a graphic novel in verse, rather than sparse verse that kind of tells a story.

One of my favorites in the collection is accompanied by a sketch of the evil queen and mirrors her “speech” to the Mirror on the Wall. Here, Bajwa’s lines take it to another level in which the Evil Queen is asking the Internet for affirmation, and in many ways, isn’t that what many people do with their posts on Instagram and Facebok, etc.

Flowers Grow on Broken Walls by Farena Bajwa explores identity in the aftermath of a breakup and abuse, but it also takes a look at identity in our self-obsessed, social media-focused world. For me, the images won me over because they were paired well with Bajwa’s words. For those who want accessible poems and some imagery, this collection is for you.

RATING: Tercet

About the Poet:

Farena Bajwa is a talented poet, storyteller, actor, filmmaker, and voice-over artist. Even though she studied Marketing Management, her creativity comes from her heart. Whether it’s filmmaking, voice-over, or acting, she owes it to her life philosophy: ‘’learning by doing’’. ‘’Flowers Grow on Broken Walls’’ is Farena’s first written collection of poetry that speaks about the journey to self-healing after experiencing the loss of someone, but mostly, the loss of yourself. She wants to inspire her readers using her power of words to make them feel less alone and to let them know that no matter what they go through, healing is just around the corner, already cheering for you.

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Ariadne Awakens: Instructions for the Labyrinth by Laura Costas

March 17, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 103 pgs.
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Ariadne Awakens: Instructions for the Labyrinth by Laura Costas reimagines the Greek myth of Ariadne in short prose poems. There’s no need to worry if you are not familiar with the myth because Costas provides you with an introduction to her character as it was developed ages ago. Her introduction serves as way to provide readers with a context that her alternate reality for forthright Ariadne springs.

In her opening poem, “Answering Machine,” Ariadne speaks to us from some outside realm, and while she would love to hear us, speak to us, and tell us what happened, she cannot. We need to imagine it and speak for her, like Costas has done. Here, our heroine awakens in a different, more modern time. She’s disoriented and fumbling to find her ground. “The rapid little flicks of your eyes produce upon you unrecognizable flesh that your bones should refuse but don’t,” the narrator begins in “Gyroscope.” In “Hot Rod,” the narrator urges, “Push your food to the floor.”

Through these topsy-turvey poems, Costas is creating a world in which we can see how limiting a myth can be, that no one is just one thing or another — hero or helper. We are all three-dimensional and multi-layered, and in some cases, we war with our desires, our practicalities, our “roles” in society.

Her poems also surprise us with their wit and humor:

“Security” (pg. 28)

Above the bed the ceiling cleaves. Beyond the cleft, around our necks, we’ve only keys. It’s the locks that make the thieves.

Or by turns, her unconventional thoughts about the society we’ve created and the blindness we all carry to its norms and expectations:

From “Civilization” (pg. 50)

…
None of us thinks to crash the turnstiles, so, turned away, we carry on, rumor and reflex at fists for our attention, the lucky ones among us to forget in the morning all that we lost last night..
…

Like in “Sagittarius,” Costas reminds us “this world was made to bend in.” (pg. 92) Ariadne Awakens: Instructions for the Labyrinth by Laura Costas is more than a retelling or reimagining of a myth — it is about the labyrinth of life, its twists and turns, its backward and forward steps, and the need for each of us to step outside the lines sometimes to find the truth of ourselves and our place in a world that makes little sense unless we provide it some direction.

RATING: Cinquain

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, New Authors Challenge, poetry, Poetry Reading Challenge, Read in 2022, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , ,

Poems From the Asylum by Martha H. Nasch, edited by Janelle Molony and introduced by Jodi Nasch Decker

March 16, 2022 by

Source: Publicity
Paperback, 336 pgs.
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Poems From the Asylum by Martha H. Nasch, edited by Janelle Molony, with an introduction from Jodi Nasch Decker, is part poetry collection, part family history and mystery, and part examination of psychiatric practices at the time of Nasch’s confinement at St. Peter State Hospital in St. Peter, Minnesota.

I don’t plan to explore much of the history of her family or how she and her husband got together, had a child, were separated by her confinement, and eventually split up. The history is informative regarding her life, though there are some mysteries regarding her treatment at the hospital and her procedure that seemed to make her more ill after birthing her son. I’d rather focus on the poems, but the whole book is an interesting exploration of this family, its dynamics, psychiatric care at the time, and so much more. About 80 pages are dedicated to the family history, family tree, maps of the neighborhoods, and more. About two-thirds of the book is Martha’s poetry, written while she was in the asylum.

**Of note is that there are asides detailing the meaning of metaphors used by Martha, as well as other techniques, which too me seemed overdone and extraneous, but to others could be helpful.**

From the early poems, it is clear that Martha feels betrayed, whether her poems are about a specific or imagined infidelity by her husband, it is unclear. Martha does not specify with whom or when the affair occurs, but it is clear that she is devastated. “When the dearest one she had on earth was unfaithful to his wife./” (from “Forbidden Lust,” pg. 94) Many of these poems read like short diary entries, seeming to be the way in which Martha tries to make sense of the heartache she feels as she has nothing else to do in the asylum but feel and wallow. She even wishes that he could feel the bitterness she does, but by the time he begs her for forgiveness, it will be too late, she says in “Failure.”

In many ways her poems fit nicely in the modernist movement of poetry, mirroring a stream of consciousness style but with rhyme.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “A Cottonwood Tree.” Martha remembers her love of nature and the changes of seasons, but soon comes to a realization that she has become like the tree, losing its leaves and entering its fall season. “To have no world, nor loved ones near,/All nature’s beauty marred./To be cast into hell, alive,/And in an asylum, barred.//” (pg. 121)

Not all of these poems are merely dedicated to her role as wife and mother. There are some about other patients, etc. These are equally as interesting. Poems From the Asylum by Martha H. Nasch, edited by Janelle Molony, with an introduction from Jodi Nasch Decker, gives readers a glimpse into world of asylums at the time, and into the mind of a woman isolated from her family.

RATING: Quatrain

Check out this interview with Janelle Molony and Jodi Nasch Decker:

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The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country by Amanda Gorman

March 15, 2022 by

Source: Gift
Hardcover, 30 pgs.
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The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country by Amanda Gorman is a beautiful book that tries to hold the hope of this poem inside its covers, but fails. The hope of Gorman’s poem oozes out of the stanzas, breaks free from the line breaks, and sizzles off the page. It’s hard to believe that she’s only our 6th poet to read at an inauguration. Where have these presidents been that they didn’t seek the powerful words of poets in their own times?

I digress. The foreword in this book is by Oprah Winfrey, and it’s about what you would expect it to be. She pulls quotes from the poem like many reviewers do and she talks about Gorman’s words, the themes, and more. But I wasn’t overly impressed with it and felt that the poem can stand on its own, just as it did at the inauguration.

It’s funny because I started this blog so many years ago, looking at individual poems in magazines, rather than full collections. And here I am again, looking at a single poem that is as powerful and beautiful as the world around us. We just need our eyes to be opened.

Is our world broken? In some ways, it is. And we do carry our losses, like we wade in the sea and the “norms” are not “justice” or “just is,” they are ripe for change and we can make them… for the better. “Victory,” Gorman says, “won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges/we’ve made.” We mustn’t forget, “History has its eyes on us.”

RATING: Cinquain

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So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter

March 9, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter, which won the DC Poet Project award in 2021, explores the broken pieces we become to find the whole. Through persona poems, particularly those with the “messy girl” and “candy girl,” Koiter explores what it means to be broken and keep going. The title itself speaks to the overwhelm that many of us have felt at one time or another in our lives, with many of us having that sense during the pandemic. Dealing with grief and sudden loss, Koiter takes us on a roller coaster of emotions, but her words resonate no matter the readers’ experiences.

Her opening poem, “Easter Night,” establishes the atmosphere of hope even in the darkness where there is the chill of services and the heels sinking into grass: “Since yesterday, the earth has tilted./The day’s last light curves/differently over my arm/on its habitual armrest, then dims/and dims to night.//What will I do with darkness in this new life?//” (pg. 1)

Koiter’s poems are otherworldly, like we’re swimming in her thoughts and trying to make sense of things like she is.

In “The Messy Girl Drives Eastward, with Impending Migraine,” her lines call to the beautiful topsy-turvy nature she’s experiencing: “Lines of birds shift in the air like words that cannot stay still/on the page, latecomers looking for a place/in an already crowded field.” Or the young girl pushing her way onto the swing set “as if/I had never left, as if I could insist/there be no world without me” in “Samsara.” (pg. 42)

As readers move through the collection, grief surfaces and falls beneath the surface. In “After Thanksgiving,” the narrator is eating brandied cranberries in yogurt, but not because she loves these leftovers particularly. It is because they make her feel closer to her mother.

The mind is always churning, it is worrying like the narrator who “worries scab after scab” in “The Messy Girl Carries a Torch for the Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing.” And in “Live Portrait” where the painter is getting the model’s image on the canvas and only “The portrait can bear/the weight of all that/looking”.

So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter a ball of our anxieties unraveled until we can do little more than see them for what they are — weights we place squarely on our own shoulders and those that we don’t. The trick is to discern which anxieties we can handle because they are our own perceptions (which we can change) and those that are heavy with loss and grief and must be accepted. “meaning today I am at my most/human, meaning I am not okay and/I’m okay” (pg.76) And it is okay to be on that precipice of everything.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Jenn Koiter is a writer, marketer, entrepreneur and breathworker. The winner of the 2021 DC Poet Project, Jenn’s debut poetry collection, “So Much of Everything,” was published in 2021 by Day Eight. Her poems and essays have appeared in Barrelhouse, Smartish Pace, Bateau, Ruminate, Copper Nickel and other journals. She lives in Washington, D.C., with three gerbils named Sputnik, Cosmo and Unit. Visit her on Twitter.

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, New Authors Challenge, poetry, Poetry Reading Challenge, Read in 2021, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , ,

None Shall Sleep by Ellie Marney (audio)

March 8, 2022 by

Source: Purchased
Audiobook, 11+ hours
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None Shall Sleep by Ellie Marney, narrated by Christine Lakin, Maxwell Hamilton, Zach Villa, and Jake Abel, was a recommendation from LittleMissStar and it was a thrilling ride. Emma Lewis and Travis Bell are recruited by the FBI to conduct interviews of convicted juvenile killers and provide insight and advice on cold cases.

What these teens are initially unaware of is an active case that has the FBI chasing their tails. A serial killer is on the loose and targeting teenagers. Lewis has to face her fears as a survivor of a serial killer herself, but to do that, she’ll have to face teenage sociopath Simon Gutmunsson, the man who killed Bell’s father, and learn what he knows about this new killer. Her demons, however, are the greatest allies she has.

Marney has taken the twisted connection between Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs and created a teenage version of that relationship, complete with the defiance and angst that teens carry when they are still trying to find their way in the world — serial killer or not.

None Shall Sleep by Ellie Marney is a wild story with FBI analysis, detective work, interviewing of serial killers, and interplay between teens and killers. Marney is deft in her world building and her character development. The pacing is on target, even if I figured out the killer before we got to the final scenes. The narrators are fantastic.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Author:

Ellie Marney is a NYT and internationally bestselling author of crime fiction. Her titles include the Aurealis-winning None Shall Sleep, White Night, the Every series – starting with Every Breath – and the companion novel No Limits, White Night, and the Circus Hearts series, starting with Circus Hearts 1. Her next book, The Killing Code, an intense mystery about female codebreakers hunting a serial killer against a backdrop of 1940s wartime Washington D.C., will be released in September 2022.

Ellie’s books are published in ten countries, and have been optioned for television. She’s spent a lifetime researching in mortuaries, talking to autopsy specialists, and asking former spies about how to make explosives from household items, and now she lives quite sedately in south-eastern Australia with her family.

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The Damage Done by Susana H. Case

March 3, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 100 pgs.
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The Damage Done by Susana H. Case (on sale as of March 1 at Broadstone – click the image to save) is a poetic narrative that explores the covert, illegal projects of the FBI, including its counter intelligence program, COINTELPRO, which was used to infiltrate domestic political organizations like the Black Panthers, feminist groups, communist organizations, and others. Janey, a fashion model in the 1960s, and her fictional murder serve as a vehicle through which Case weaves her poetic narrative.

"Woman Identified" (pg. 12)

...Janey looks untroubled
and is running in a bold-patterned

dress past a bridge, debris in soft
focus piled off by the side.
The detective laughs about it later
with his buddies, a strange photo
to sell clothes you can't even

clearly see. Surrounded by rubble.
Painted-on eyelashes - as if
she's a child's doll - 
she looks as if she could blow
away. Part of her did.

Case’s voice reads like crime thriller and a noir detective tale in which a young lady is tired of her modeling life, falls into gun running and pill popping, even as her husband strives to place his heavy boot on her and rein her in. The collection opens with a dead girl in a car – Janey – and the detective on the case continues to face roadblocks to solving her murder. Is it easier to go along with the FBI’s theories or investigate a murder of a young woman. And how the decision weighs on the detective and pushes him further to drink and unravel himself.

The paranoid atmosphere infuses her lines in “The Psychiatric Institute”: “Janey thought the Feds were after her,/She was right. The cops/all agree she was a wacko.” Case has a cast of believable characters in her collection, and while it is poetry; it’s hard not to turn the pages to see what happens next, much like reading a thriller. It’s an examination of psychological motivations, an illegal FBI program that may still be operating, and the lives that it destroyed in the name of justice.

I could not put down The Damage Done by Susana H. Case once I picked it up. This is one poetry collection that will have you on the edge of your seat.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Susana H. Case, Ph. D., is the author of eight books of poetry. The Damage Done, from Broadstone Books (2022) is her newest. Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books (2020), won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, a NYC Big Book Awards Distinguished Favorite, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Drugstore Blue, from Five Oaks Press, won an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY). She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her poems appear widely in magazines and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in: Calyx, The Cortland Review, Fourteen Hills, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, and RHINO, among others. She has been published via translation into Polish, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Case is co-editor, with Margo Taft Stever, of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press (2022).

Case is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press and co-curates, with Lynn McGee (series founder), Sandy Yannone, and Carolyne Wright, the W-E (West-East) Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic and Beyond series which features writers from both coasts and many other regions. She recently retired as Professor from the New York Institute of Technology in New York City, where she taught for thirty-eight years.

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For Her Name’s Sake by Monica Leak

March 2, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 116 pgs.
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For Her Name’s Sake by Monica Leak is a cry for not just equal justice but JUSTICE for women of color. Leak embodies these women’s stories to share them with her readers and explore the injustices faced by these women who were abandoned by the systems meant to protect society as a whole. Some of these women were taken too soon, but Leak invokes their spirit to help us see — without turning away — and encourage us to rise up for those who can no longer do so for themselves.

In “Handle With Care,” Leak tells speaks to the outward pressures society places on financially-strapped families and those in need of care, not arrest in her poem for Tanisha Anderson. This mother “Amid an escort struggle, the body becomes limp/The cops applied excessive use of force/To restrain another life lost in death” (pg. 10-11) A mother having a mental health crisis in need of assistance, she’s assisted right into the grave.

From "Who'll Be a Witness?" (pg. 49)

Who'll be a witness?
A witness who can say what they saw
A witness who can tell what they heard
A witness who can describe the scene and circumstances

Leak is that witness. Each poem focuses on a life shortened or a life altered by institutional injustice, from people killed for having fake weapons to welfare checks gone wrong. Leaks poems are filled with anger, tension, and will leave readers uneasy as they should. These are lives she wants us to remember, the circumstances they found themselves in that were beyond their control, and how justice was not served by those charged with serving it.

"No Charges" (pg. 77)

It's like daily walking on pins and needles, living on 
guard
To constantly violate the rights of people of color and
there never is a charge

#Rosann Miller

For Her Name’s Sake by Monica Leak is a poignant collection in a time when it is sorely needed, even as we wish it were unnecessary. These are women who lost their lives and their ways of life — many had families, lost loved ones, and so much promise.

RATING: Tercet

About the Poet:

Monica Leak uses the power of information to reach others through creative content. Monica’s works include contributions to six Lent devotionals, one women’s empowerment anthology and two self-published collections of social justice-themed poetry. You can learn more about Monica by following MLeakPoetry on all social media platforms (Facebook/Instagram/Twitter) and visiting monicaspeaks.org.

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Ashes to Justice by R.E.I.L.

March 1, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 46 pgs.
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(**note that this collection could be triggering for child abuse survivors)

Ashes to Justice by R.E.I.L. is a deeply personal collection of poetic resilience and strength. The opening poem, “Piece for PEACE” is a tribute to her grandmother and the strength she showed the young girl every day and the devastation of loss the young woman feels due to her grandmother’s passing. It’s a poem of learning to live without a loved one, but also an homage to the strength a grandmother instilled in a granddaughter: “my mind was dedicated/To being the strongest woman I could ever be/You are my hero, and I miss you/” (pg. 1)

It is clear that this poet has suffered, but she has chosen to strive for strength and resilience. Her poetry explores her efforts and her setbacks, but it is clear she will not let the abuse rule her life and take her down. From “Her Testimony,” “A little girl sad/Her life had no glory//And she wanted me to tell her story/She wants you to know that it feels good to be alive//This young girl died four times/Then was brought back to life!//” (pg. 3) It is through this spoken-word style that the narrator of the poem unpacks the sexual abuse story and brings forth the concept of “Reborn Early In Life” (R.E.I.L.). It becomes a moniker that sets the redemptive tone for the entire collection.

She strives to explore what “sexy” means and how it should be defined by not only society but ourselves. These poems are a sussing out of the past and the narrative present to determine how she should be viewed by herself, her lovers, and ultimately, what love and affection should be and how it should feel. The poet also tackles familial love and how it should be. In “A Real Man,” she implores a father to console her and the understand that not everything is about him.

Ashes to Justice by R.E.I.L. is a cathartic journey for a survivor of abuse, but it also is a lesson in how to learn what love is and not just what you’ve been given. It’s a soul-searching collection in which “where I come from” shouldn’t and doesn’t dictate who you are and what you deserve out of life. “Realizing that no one person is the problem/But we’re all part of the solution/And somewhere between here now and then/We need a resolution//” (pg. 29-31; “Fighting Temptations”)

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

R.E.I.L. started her poetry career at open mics in the D.C. area and at 16 competed in the Brave New Voices slam in New York City. A poetic performer, visual artist, and arts educator teaching in D.C. schools, R.E.I.L. seeks inspiration from past and present life experiences to help the lives of other unsung souls.

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