Review by Jami Macarty

In Abbreviate, Sarah Fawn Montgomery skillfully examines the myriad ways girls are conditioned to “shrink smaller” so boys can “get bigger.” Through interconnected lyric micro-essays, she reflects on how small, often overlooked or downplayed experiences accumulate into a multilayered life-narrative of diminishment that demonstrates what girls face in various environments, including homes, schools, literature, and video games. Montgomery sensitively and candidly addresses domestic violence, casual intimidation, and sexual assault, revealing the double standards and dismissive attitudes that permeate these spaces.

Starting from middle school and continuing to college, Montgomery illustrates the pervasive nature of misogyny, particularly within educational settings. Both male and female authority figures perpetuate pressures to conform and perform that lead girls to harm themselves, as they struggle with unrealistic standards for their bodies. The title essay places this theme in sharp relief.

In “Abbreviate,” Montgomery uses the situation of female students sharing the same name — “we Sarahs are too many” — to illustrate how girls are forced to adapt for the convenience of their teachers: “When our names are … replaced with a letter, we become small like our bodies, a period at the end to signal that the decision is not ours.”

Despite the awful predicament of this “endless cycle,” some essays celebrate the “small miracles” of female friendship: A refuge where girls can “tend to what haunted” and “heal hurts no one would see or believe.” The saving support of aunts, sisters, and friends helps shift their focus from looking down to “up at the stars.”

By speaking out to “constellate our collective hurts,” girls can escape oppression and reclaim their stories as “someone seen … someone believed.” As Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s essays navigate the patriarchal landscape particular to American culture, a woman emerges with “Strength newly summoned,” understanding herself and her place in the world. Abbreviate is a necessary and resonant book.

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Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery. Small Harbor Publishing, May 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.

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In a Body, Emily Hockaday’s second poetry collection considers a body that “feels / less and less like mine,” and what it might be like to be “outside / of time.” The movement from corporeal to incorporeal suggests trauma and an “interconnected web of pain.” The poems, offered to readers by a mother of a daughter located at the crossroads of a “diagnosis” and “the other side of us,” allude to substance abuse, mental health, chronic pain, breast cancer, and a father’s death.

Given that, it is no wonder that the narrator declares: “I want to be like the Earth, / but I want to be treated better.” Seen via the “micro and macro,” the body of these poems is “compartmentalized” and “becoming”; the body is seen in relation or comparison; the body is seen “after,” “in,” “as,” “at,” “of,” “above,” “before,” “from,” and “through” “momentum” and “metamorphosis.”Poem titles offer the body “Becoming the Owl,” the “Body in the Spring”; “Body Above Water” or “Body as Wood,” etc.

The poet returns to the “Body as Tree” idea several times. When the body is seen as a tree, the mycelia connecting it to other trees is analogous to the “power” that neural pain “wields,” and the network of shared grief over personal and communal loss. Both the narrator’s diagnoses and the death of her father tell us the “body / is ephemeral.”

These poems remind us that we live precariously with “how many batteries / lie below the surface” and our “humanity’s failures.” Survival and recovery depend on “the knowledge that / anything can happen.”

Hockaday’s In a Body “understand[s] what it means / to be” in a “future … never / imagined.”

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In a Body by Emily Hockaday. Small Harbor Publishing, October 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.