Review by Jami Macarty
In Hesitation Waltz, the 2023 selection in the Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series, Amie Whittemore crafts multimorphic poems that reflect our “ruined and beautiful” world. Through a blend of pastorals, odes, elegies, and epistles, which take form alongside meditations, lullabies, and personae poems, she gives voice to the “vulnerable … narratives” of life; its “riches” and “promise,” “precarity” and “shadow.”
To explore what “is miraculous” and interrogate “Who’s complicit,” Whittemore speaks from “mouths [that] cannot be tamed / and thankfully so.” The various poetic forms mirror her contortionist-like struggle to articulate essential truths and forge connections with her audience, establishing a powerful bond between the poem, the speaker, and the listener.
A hallmark of Whittemore’s poems is their distinct address. Whether the poet is speaking to a student in a science fiction course who complained on an evaluation about being “uncomfortable” with “women befriending / robot spiders,” to a goldfinch adapting to “human activity, / deforestation,” to “a woman who likes dishing about nuns,” to “the half-male, half-female cardinal,” or to her one-year-old nephew, she skillfully balances narrative directness with lyric tenderness.
The chapbook’s title references “The Hesitation Waltz,” a 1950 oil painting by Surrealist René Magritte. This reference suggests the surreal struggles inherent in finding a romantic connection with a hesitant lesbian and comprehending our dependence on fossil fuels. In Hesitation Waltz, Amie Whittemore advocates for “strange thinking” as we seek solutions to the “world’s problems” and celebrates our “myriad existence” in an uncertain yet hopeful dance.
Hesitation Waltz by Amie Whittemore. Midwest Writing Center Press, March 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
