Review by Jami Macarty

In his debut, award-winning collection, Book of Kin, Darius Atefat-Peckham explores the “haunting” intersections of his life as an “only child of grief” with a mother he describes as someone “who will die, many times, over” in life and imagination. Atefat-Peckham’s poems are infused with “[hush] music” that oscillates between “breaking” and “accumulation.” His poem “They Wake Me” poignantly asks, “How many beloveds in me will I survive?” This unveils the dialogue between the poet and the fragments of self that emerge from grief. Both poet and son “want / To see what, at the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.”

Book of Kin has three sections: “The First Sound,” “Book of Kin,” and “The Outer Reaches.” Each section seeks kinship with the mother and brother Atefat-Peckham lost in a car accident, his Iranian heritage and language, his artistic life and “perennial living.”

Atefat-Peckham’s poetry is arresting, self-aware. The narrative and emotion in the poems are intricately tied to formal choices. For example, in the poem “Heathcliffs,” the poet often makes line breaks on words with glottal-stopped consonants, such as “lost,” “meant,” “wait,” “night,” and “want.” This end-word consonance creates a repeated plosive sound, evoking themes of fragility and mortality. Right-justified poems convey the “staggering” loss of family members. Concrete poems shaped like portholes offer an “ethereal lens” to other realms of consciousness. Bracketed words within poems connect to reveal additional meanings and new perspectives.

Each line of Atefat-Peckham’s poetry is wrought with celebration and sorrow, a combination reminiscent of both the poetry of Rumi and Susan Atefat-Peckham, the poet’s mother. Book of Kin serves as both a mourning ritual and a celebratory hymn, “teaching” readers “something about worship” while inviting us into an intimate conversation between spiritual, physical, and artistic realms.

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Book of Kin by Darius Atefat-Peckham. Autumn House Press, October 2024. Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize as selected by January Gill O’Neil.

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.

Review by Jami Macarty

Speaking from a Nest of Matches, Amie Whittemore knows “the long burden / of… death.” In “Summer Swim,” the poet writes, “Too often, my poems are love notes / / to the past.”

While Whittemore’s poems harvest “a penchant / for melancholy,” they also write through an acceptance of multiple losses and a recovery of a whole self. Just as “death upon death” gives rise to an “urgent but futile wish to control its narrative,” so too, “is it possible to love one’s / own tattered self.”

The “tattered self” in Nest of Matches “seek[s], like every / / fled human before [her],” a sense of self “beyond fragmentation” and the “freedom” to “unfurl” a queer self as legitimate of life and worthy of love.

The tension between these dynamics is reflected in the collection’s title. In “nest” there is shelter but it is a hotbed of undesirable things. The hemispherical shape of a nest echoes in the sometimes-ruminating poems and in the twelve-poem series devoted to each month’s full moon.

In “Flower Moon,” a name given to May’s full moon attributed to the Algonquin peoples, Whittemore cues the reader to a “turn” of awareness “never-not-awkward”:

“Here I am again,
giving the moon
my baggage,
asking it to carry
my longing,
my fullness.”

Depicting the tidal forces between Earth and the moon and self and other, Whittemore’s “moon” series cannot help but conjure Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (1972). The moon is a feminine symbol associated with water, emotion, the rhythm of light, and the cycle of time. Or as Whittemore writes in “Aubade,” “there’s so many agains inside me,” “new and repetitious as moons.”

“Language remains a wobbly bridge” in Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches, but language is what “veins” the collection’s “fearless and true” conversations over “life’s / many distances.”

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Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore. Autumn House Press, March 2024.

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.