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Book Review :: In the Wake by Ariel Machell

In the Wake by Ariel Machell book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Comet Neowise was visible in the Northern Hemisphere’s night sky during July 2020. A group of friends “camping near the water to see” the comet serves as the backdrop for Ariel Machell’s debut chapbook, In the Wake, which explores the theme of “fleetingness,” asking: “How much will we allow to pass us by?”

Predominantly composed of prose poems, the collection is an apostrophe to the Willamette River, an elegy for past intimacy, a celebration of cosmic phenomena, and introspective “thinking about what made an ending.” The poems alternate between addressing Memory as an intimate other and recounting the camping trip when the comet “erupted” into the group’s shared vision, propelling readers toward philosophical inquiry about the essence of memory and how it navigates the complexities of time and distance.

Machell’s writing is firmly rooted in the river’s landscape and the relentless nature of memory, demonstrating a rich eco-philosophical elegiac lyricism. Her poetics prioritize felt experience over narrative clarity, offering deep intimacy while purposefully omitting specifics of the betrayal. “The sadness — I refused to explain it.” This absence inspires further inquiry: Does the origin of a feeling matter, or is the emotion itself the primary focus? The lack of definitive answers is among the collection’s strengths, embracing the “indefinite” with vulnerability.

Machell captures the “idea,” “image,” and “feel of” grief without resolution, allowing each poem to stir with the potential to “wake.” A vigil, disturbed water, an emergence — the triple entendre of the collection’s title allows “Possibility to do all the heavy work.” The title allows the poet-speaker to mourn the end of a romantic relationship, navigate the disturbed water left behind memory’s boat, and to catalyze “Waking up.” Some endings are beginnings.

In the Wake by Ariel Machell. Finishing Line Press, October 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.

Sponsored :: New Book :: Language Like Water

cover of Language Like Water by Nancy Gerber

Language Like Water: Poems, Poetry by Nancy Gerber

Finishing Line Press, December 2024

Language Like Water explores the conflicts, challenges, and connections in a daughter’s relationship with her mother over the span of a lifetime. The poems resonate with longing and struggle as the daughter seeks to understand and restore her complicated mother, an enigmatic figure who struggles with depression. Ultimately the daughter recognizes her own strengths as she acknowledges and inscribes moments and memories of sharing and connection.

Bisbing Books has this to say: “Language Like Water is a moving, deeply personal glimpse into the mother-daughter relationship. The complexity of this bond is explored through sharp, evocative imagery that digs deep into the emotional terrain of love, guilt, memory, and loss. There’s a sense that words carry weight far beyond their surface meaning. Read these poems.”

New Book :: What You Wish For

What You Wish For poetry by Ruth Bardon book cover image

What You Wish For by Ruth Bardon
Finishing Line Press, March 2023

In What You Wish For, Ruth Bardon uses a feminist lens to take a fresh look at wishes, witches, magic spells, princesses, sleeping beauties, and 21st century queen bees. Her poems are sympathetic both to hopeful, yearning heroines and to equally hopeful, yearning villains and minor characters. At the same time, they are darkly pessimistic about the possibility of happy endings. With subtlety and humor, these quiet poems radically deconstruct familiar stories. Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in journals, and her first chapbook, Demon Barber, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020.

New Book :: Sheltered in Place

Sheltered in Place poetry by CJ Giroux book cover image

Sheltered in Place
Poetry by CJ Giroux
Finishing Line Press, August 2022

Infused with images of the natural world, Sheltered in Place features a braid of three poetic sequences. The first focuses on a grown child’s relationship with an aging parent living in a memory ward; the second focuses on a parent marking the growth of a child from her birth through her teen years; the third sequence, which gives the collection its title, examines life in the early days of the pandemic when shutdowns were imposed. CJ Giroux is a professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, has helped direct the school’s writing center, and serves on the editorial board of Dunes Review. His dissertation, which he completed at Wayne State University, focused on representations of trauma in 20th- and 21st-century American plays.