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Guest Post by Elizabeth Basok

Hildr Fragments, written by Dani L Smith, is a collection of poems covering relationships, notably a lengthy relationship that was both co-dependent and abusive.

Smith is a British expat living in South Korea; she meets a fellow expat, an older Canadian, who proves to be problematic from the start of their relationship. The author is forced to pull herself from the relationship after years of gaslighting (“even when I caught you in a lie you somehow succeeded in making me second-guess myself and making me feel crazy”), cheating, and even physical abuse. The author covers all the heavy aspects of leaving an abusive relationship from losing your household belongings, “11 drunken, psychotic messages within one hour,” and the time that she will never get back.

The word “Hildr” means “battle” in Old Norse, and we see the author battle with the desire to stay in an abusive relationship, her attempts to break from her abuser’s hold over her, her recovering from a miscarriage, and ultimately freeing herself from abuse and looking onward to the future.

Hildr Fragments by Dani L Smith. Independently published, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Basok is a lecturer at The Ohio State University. Her Instagram is @lizbasok.

Guest Post by Nora Aronson

There is little between the word and the flesh in Thomas Cook’s daunting and terrifying Light Through a Pane of Glass. “There is perfection in the early dark / the smell of moist figs,” he writes in “Three Meditations,” yet life and death lurks beneath this observation, as it does beneath so many others in this debut collection.

Cook has been the editor and publisher of the longstanding journal Tammy and their chapbook press. His poems have appeared widely, and in several chapbooks, but until this collection there has not been a full understanding of his poetic project, which comes, anachronistically, on the heels of pastoral philosophers such as Lorine Niedecker and James Wright—this book features its own “Journey Westward,” has its own “deep water”—while it also pursues an existential agenda in poems such as “Two Figures”:

Afraid to accept a purer perception,
they busy themselves
with the intelligible world,
leaving much lost;
a thought, persists

Are we dearer in absence, you and I?”

Light Through a Pane of Glass will leave you thirsty in the Mojave Desert and abandon you to the Midwest. It is unflinching in the face of inheritance, addiction, and death. In it, you will smell figs, taste dates, and be grateful for afternoon onions. It will make you real.

Light Through a Pane of Glass by Thomas Cook. Big Table, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Nora Aronson is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her first book, Instances of Calamity, was a finalist in the Uninterrupted First Book Contest. Her work has appeared in Bat City Review, Exhume Magazine, and Terra Firma.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Let.

Timothy Liu wrote the most beautiful homage/obituary for poet Linda Gregg, published in The New York Times (“Linda Gregg, Poet of Taut, Vivid Verse, Is Dead at 76,” March 27, 2019) and Plume (“My Own Private Parthenon,” Issue #93, May 2019). Look these up if you have not read them. Let your tears flow, but not only for Gregg, who is known for her “chiseled in marble” poems, but for Liu, whose language explores the ruins of these, also a very serious poet; yet different, a very tongue-in-cheek poet. I imagine him exploring various surfaces and various crevices with his tongue, letting it slide and ride and taste all life has to offer. He does this in his latest book of poems, Let It Ride. He takes us to scenes exploring the aftermath of ecstasies of the body in low-brow and high-brow places, in City Mouse and Country Mouse places. Liu is a poet who rides in both places and steps back to let us also see the scene. Continue reading “Let. Goings. Disappear.”