Review by Jami Macarty

In Walking the Burn, Rachel Kellum thoughtfully intertwines literal and metaphorical language to explore the devastation wrought by fire, both in nature and within personal lives. The “burn” symbolizes not only the physical destruction marked by “a ring of char” and the “black skeletons / of juniper,” but also deeper emotional scars, including betrayals, injuries, and societal issues connected to Mormon patriarchy, sibling death, relationship failures, mental illness, and racial injustice. Kellum’s central question: “How did we get here?”

The collection is structured into three sections — Arise, Abide, and Dissolve — mirroring the process of mindfulness and inviting readers to engage in introspective reflection. The narrative unfolds from Kellum’s childhood, addressing themes of familial trauma and the complexities of relationships with her father, intimate partners, and sons, before transitioning to a focus on aging, grief, healing, and forgiveness.

Kellum’s autobiographical poems resonate with authenticity as she candidly navigates the stark contrasts between societal expectations and personal realities. Her vulnerability reveals the tensions that persist not just in her life but within broader social landscapes. Notably poignant are the series of poems that hold vigil for murdered Black men, including Philando Castille, Terrance Crutcher, and George Floyd. Kellum invokes their names while being conscious of her place in their narratives. While she tries “Not to make this story” hers, her experience in an interracial relationship informs the outrage, grief, and anxiety apparent in these poems.

In one moment, Kellum reflects on the difficulty of “saying less,” recognizing the weight of her words. Each poem radiates a “clear promise,” attesting to her roles as a daughter, sister, lover, and mother, all while serving a greater purpose for family and society. Ultimately, in Walking the Burn, Kellum invites us to walk alongside her through both the beauty and devastation of life’s experiences.

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Walking the Burn by Rachel Kellum. Middle Creek Publishing, 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.

Review by Jami Macarty

In Wonder About The, Matthew Cooperman “presents / / a spilling presence” of Colorado’s Cache la Poudre River:

Like an open vein, like a sluiced giant, it rolls on through cottonwood
     and willow body, through thistle and rabbit brush, grama and
          blue stem, through drought and illusion, it rolls on
               beyond us, the river flayed in moonlight (“Thesis”)

Cooperman’s eco- and documentary poetic “pulses in… / a rhythm” of “fluid” enactment, environmental activism, and river ecology, “palimpsesting” on water flow reports, geological surveys, “Colorado homesteading history,” environmental impact studies, and a Colorado oil and gas industry “Well Prediction Map.” Throughout the collection’s three sections, the poems roll like a river lyrically, fragmentarily, and narratively freely mixing reportage, collage, and erasure with homage and elegy. Regardless of their poetic mode or compositional method ultimately the poems aim to “Save the Poudre!”

The poems educate readers about the threats to the waterway’s fragile ecology: “a toil of oil,” the “rhetoric of monuments,” “people on the river,” “lifestyles,” and “progress.” And, the poems raft on inquiry: “what is a river / and what is a season / and what is the reason of oil.” As Cooperman’s poems prompted me to consider “what the river’s for,” I thought about the Diamond-Water Paradox which poses the question: If we need water to survive and we do not need diamonds, why are diamonds expensive and water cheap?

From advocacy and from love, Matthew Cooperman carves a “structure of all / perception” through a channel where the two tributaries of wonder are “alive and shimmering.”

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Wonder About The by Matthew Cooperman. Middle Creek Publishing, June 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, 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, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Linda Russo’s The Verdant, 2023 Halcyon Poetry Award Winner, goes beyond usual eco-poetics to explore what it means to utter human sounds in wild places. In this case, the green world, the world away from plastics and electricity, becomes the focus, becomes the world.

The section called ‘Emergence’ is a long poem/poem series that makes up the book. Under the title/heading, “wild plum, western blue flax, wooly sunflower, come in,” Russo gives us what is essential about communing with wild places:

[. . . ] with rubbly tongue caressing grasses
dropping live seeds caught in songs

We are whisked away to a landscape which does not seem like this planet at all because it is so much the planet that we forget where we are. Russo speaks from the land and all its inhabitants as a being moving through the landscape in a unique way.

Inventive open form poems with lots of white space, careful construction of headings/titles at the top of each page, and a meditative feature at the end do not let us off the hook; we must participate in this world.

the verdant is what happens after spending time out-of-doors. The doorway of the mind is propped open, left open to possibility.

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the verdant by Linda Russo. Middle Creek Publishing & Audio, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).