It’s been a very long time since I’ve done book reviews and the stack under my desk keeps toppling over. So I’ve decided to start with books by the womens, in honor of the nasty manosphere news and trolling social media comment sections of 2026.
And even at that, I’ll have to split up the books into two posts. There are twelve books here just in this post! I don’t know how to order them so we’ll proceed alphabetically.
Robin Becker, Midsummer Count, New and Selected Poems (2026)
This is the only collection in this stack, a review copy sent to me by The University of New Mexico Press. I wish collected and selected books would include the publication year when they section off the poems by book, so you can see the poet’s progress over time. I see this missing in quite a few anthologies.
It took me a while to finish this book because I didn’t start out liking the early poems. They seemed to get more universal and transcendent toward the end. The early poems didn’t really take off. Later poems kept the personal experiences but balanced those better with something extra engaging. The earlier poems I liked tended to be about objects like “At the Spoon-Carving Workshop” and “The Pencil Poem.” “Security Clearance” is another interesting early poem where the poet remembers a prior student.
Common themes for Becker are her experiences as a gay woman (“Dyke,” “A History of Sexual Preference” and “Peter Pan in North America” were my favorite examples), being Jewish (this was also a theme in the Lucie Brock-Broido book below), poems like “The Sounds of Yiddish” where “Yiddish hisses with chicken schmaltz/sizzling for knishes,” “The New Egypt,” “The Crypto-Jews” and “Too Jewish” are all good examples and, “In the Days of Awe” which is a beautiful amalgamation of both.
Her sister’s suicide trails all through the collections, sometimes in big ways like in “Borderline” where “I grew/adjacent and then away–leaving you sister,/on the margin of error, your uncultivated strip,/staring at coastlines where others converged,” or in “Later Words for My Sister” where “the difference/is a conundrum, a fracture in continuity,/the way his daughters broke from his plan,” or in small mentions like in the poem “Shopping.”
There are good horse poems from the book The Horse Fair including the 8-part title poem and “Phaeton.”
And maybe I liked the second half best for the New Mexico poems I’m partial to, poems like “Elegy for a Secular Man,” “Solar,” “Yom Kippur, Taos, New Mexico,” “Death of the Owl,” “The Return” where with her dog “in the Sangre de Cristo we run/through paintbrush and columbine,” and “Old Woman and Hills” where she describes the pink foothills around Chimayo.
She also has recurring relationship poems of which I liked best the end of “The Roast Chicken” with the ending, “like a lover who knows it’s over/and speaks kindly, finally, in a cafe/before she disappears. And you’re left/knowing that she was your best chance,/though she would say/your best chances are the ones you take.” And the very sexy poem “The Bath.”
Other highlights are “Giacometti’s Dog” (another great dog poem), “Birch Trees” and “The Subject of Our Lives.”
There was a great stanza that should make feminists of all of us at end of “Haircut of Via Di Mezzo:”
“The eight-year old rose for her haircut
and siblings turned to stare. On one side of me sat
her brothers; on the other, her parents, and an aged grandmother
dressed for the affair in black. The cutter beckoned
with a long finger, and I saw, suddenly, a rope uncoil
and her hair twist down the child’s back to the floor.
When the scissors snapped and the first hank of hair fell
to the marble tiles, the girl whirled, the whites
in her eyes flashing. I saw tears bubble
and slide down her face as she fixed her gaze on her father.
Cool and serene, he nodded to her, his youngest child,
and she, obedient, knowing what had to be, leaned
toward the blades and turned her wildness inside.”
Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters (1995)
Brock-Broido is actually on my Pinterest page of poets with great hair.
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The poems are inspired by the mysterious “Master Letters” written by Emily Dickinson. I ate up the Preamble where Brock-Broido gives her take on the letters and explains her project for the book. But the poems were too enigmatic, personal and coded, despite their beauty on the page or by the rhythms of their lines, and the great vocabulary.
My favorite pieces, not surprisingly, were the poems fashioned as letters outright: “Unholy” (subscription wall), “To a Strange Fashion of Forsaking,” “Her Habit” (“To all except great dread, the heart adjusts/I do not let go, because it is–Mine.”) “From the Proscenium (subscription wall),” “Pursuit of Happiness” (“I send a message by a Mouth that cannot speak”) and “Into Those Great Countries of the Blue Sky of Which We Don’t Know Anything.”
I also liked “Prescient” with the lines “Master–you were having your veins cleaned out of Me–/A burred spike down the artery’s shaft, thistling./You have the catchweed of quiet on your tongue, I have/the power of speech. Parts of the body will always live/By the lair…”
So kind of evocative and dark and Dickinson-ish; but I got fatigued with nothing solid to hold on to. I mean Emily Dickinson can be enigmatic, too, but she balances that with a dearth of personal details and it somehow works.
Peggy Pond Church, New and Selected Poems (1976)
This is one of New Mexico’s big writers but her books are all pretty hard to find these days. I found a PDF of this one months ago. It’s a slim book, 8 to 9 poems selected from three books, only 1 poem from a fourth book and 10 new poems. Sixty-one pages is a very slender book for a selected collection
From the 1933 book Foretaste, we have “Sheep Country” which is set in New Mexico: “the sheep come up from the canyons/Like a grey cloud” and the poem mentions wild choke cherry, Capulin canyon and Rabbit mountain (near Jemez), Cienega, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, and the “flat, dusty mesas/where they have fed all winter.” The poem also place-drops Chamita, Abiquiu, Espanola, Nambe and Pojoaque.
“To the sea of grasses,/The far-off, tangled, grass-hidden threads of water.”
A lot of other poems seem less specifically placed but always touching back to natural spaces, a “time-oblivious river” or “the more we could be aware of the world,/of the color and sound of it, of the taste in our mouths.”
I loved “Winter Sketch” which evokes the quiet darkness you can find in New Mexico not so far out from the cities:
“And there is a house with a blue door and a blue-framed window
Like a reminder of the sky, and a lamp lit in it;
And three pigs; and a cow chewing her cud in a dooryard.
Finally only the noiseless, invisible snow pricking down in darkness.”
And then there’s a penetente poem, very New-Mexico specific to the outback Catholicism found here:
“He brought the woven whip across his shoulders
With a lasting sound, rhythmical, like an accent;
A sound that was dull and harsh, as though already
Blood softened the lean back.”
Some of her conclusions are a bit didactic. She loves the semi-colon. From her book Ultimatum for Man (1946), the title poem talks about closed frontiers and turning around to face what we are running from, “there is no country we can flee to.” The titles are dire during World War II: “Comment on a Troubled Era,” “Omens,” “Epitaph for Man,” “The Nuclear Physicists” and in the poem “Prelude to Act IV” where she says “our destiny/is that of heroes who must always die/by their own mortal flaw. No enemy/can doom us but ourselves.”
Her new poems (from 1948 to 1975) include two elegies for another Santa Fe poet, Haniel Long. “December” is another poem that worries about planet destruction. My favorite poem “Lament” is maybe about her husband, the “tools left hanging in your workshop…it is the workman in you that I weep for:/ the squares and the levels…there is nothing you would not try/to make or mend.//You are gone now./How often my own life seems past any mending.”
The last poem is from the book The Ripened Fields (1954), a poem called “Whom God Hath Joined” which ends “Who see…that struggle each for his own soul/was struggle side by side.”
Peggy Pond Church committed suicide in 1986 at age 82, according to Wikipedia, “following the guidelines of the Hemlock Society that she was a member of.”
Jennifer Elise Foerster, Leaving Tulsa (2013)
I did enjoy this book. It felt like a poem of maps, poems along roads and landscapes. Foerster is part Muscogee and received her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. The first poem “Relic” starts it off with “An atlas/on the underside of my dream…a map of America/flapping in the dark.
Other favorites were “Leaving Tusla,” the indescribable recipe of “Vanishing Lessons,” “Chimera” (“I have traveled this continent/for no other reason but to search/for evidence of your existence.//In the stars, America, your highway/ vanishes. Black moths are captured/in headlights and swallowed”) and “American Coma.”
Here is the end of “Tracing Magdalena:”
“At land’s end
no witnesses.
Not even the trees
stretched on the horizon.
Not even the night
snowing from the vent in my ribs.
I dream a pathway
to the edge of my canvas.
Beyond that–
you.”
Alicia Gaspar de Alba, La Llorona on the Longellow Bridge (2003)
La Llorona is vengeful ghost in Hispanic folklore and this was a book interesting to me in that the poet has created a memoir of poems that covered multiple moves (or places) across the country, including Iowa City, Boston and Albuquerque and Los Angeles and the thread of cultural spaces, especially in-between liminal spaces.
The introductory essay, “Tracking La Llorona,” was an overview of her multi-cultural border crossings (her fronteriza voice) and the impulse to write poetry. Another essay “Literary Wetback” talks about trying to explain to Bostonians what growing up on the border or La Frontera means and being in that culturally liminal space. “Name That Border” was another essay depicting the multi-cultural construction of her name.
I love food poems and especially Mexican-food poems so “The Philosophy of Frijoles” about cleaning beans (“only the perfect pintos/could be our friends”) was a favorite. And the end of “Gardenias for El Gran Gurú” about culture following her to other places, like Boston: “Papá/I have heard La Llorona even in Boston/in the screech of the train tracks,/in the icy waves/beneath the Longfellow Bridge.”
In “Caldo de Pollo” the poem starts as a recipe for chicken soup that becomes a memory and then a photograph and then a prediction of a girl who died and became a drunken woman. “The carrots and the grandfather stopped breathing./The drunken woman climbed the wagon/of dreams and went North./And the broth boils on,/the chicken blood spiced with rosemary,/the sweet basil of possibility,/the rue and the onions and the garlic/becoming caldo de pollo,/tonic for a rainy night./29 skins ago, I did not know the recipe.” “Confessions” is a harrowing poem about rape (by a priest).
There’s a whole Albuquerque section: “Autumn Equinox in the Sandias, 1990,” “Bluebirds” (“You asked if I would ever leave you/and the bluebirds/caught in my throat/broke like promises/into song”) and “Chamizal.”
And there’s a Los Angeles section with “Huitlacoche Crepes” (which as the title suggests is about the cultural mashup) and a great poem called “Neighbors” about removing a dog’s bark, the voice of anyone in general for the purpose of feeling cultural comfort). I also loved section V. of “Carmen’s Song” (about dancing and how “a lady loves a confident dancer”), “Kylie Eleison for La Llorona” where she pulls the ghost through all her cites and finally, “Eclipse (September 11th) New York City, 2001,” a cultural tour-de-force about 9/11 and tragedy that is multi-cultural.
Cynthia Huntingon, Heavenly Bodies (2012)
I read this quite a while ago. So I’m dependent upon my dog-ears and marginalia to remember what I liked. I can’t remember how I came to the book. Was it sent for entering a contest or from a college bookstore?
In any case, here were my favorites:
“Bastard’s Song,” the first poem of the collection is a kind of evocative and yet bizarre family poem or maybe even an origin story. “Meds” and “Bride of the Barbiturate” are meditations on pain and pills, “Whole House Gone to Hell” is a harrowing family poem where from “1967, late in the empire of America./Years pass, and it’s always this time. We wait, listening/for the silence after things stop falling.” Then there’s “Recovery Room” formatted in three columns and blocks that evokes the fragmentation of hospital recovery.
The long poem, “Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution: The True Adventures of Suzy Creamcheese,” (here’s part 1) reminded me that it was her conflicted take on the 1960s that fascinated me in this book, especially the last section of the poem:
“I slept with my lovers, I slept with my friends,
my lovers’ friends and my friends’ lovers,
friends of friends and so on. I slept with my dealer
and my dealer’s dealer, just to be sure.
I slept with some men I barely knew
to prove I was open-minded, or to avoid an arguement,
and I slept with some men I didn’t like
just to be nice, or, well, to avoid an arguement.
….
Yet what I loved most
was hard dancing to loud music: that beat through the floor,
and bodies swaying, sweating, the tension building,
and getting just to the edge of it, in a room, in a woods,
down a hallway wedged inside a bathroom stall, falling
down fast, or leaning back brace yourself
on the wall, diving into it like stepping on a mine–just
blowing yourself up, all the while holding on
to some sweating, panting guy also blowing himself up–
just kick out the door hard mindless sex–I wanted it
as much as the next guy, the next high priestess of come,
and it was ours and all new and fine, and would never end,
until one day love comes rolling up like swamp gas
fermented for years in the collective unconscious
of old songs and bad movies, a distant memory wakening.
His thumbs in his belt loops, his crooked smile
and dark moods, and you think this one is a god
or an avatar of destiny, and you’re nothing unless
he loves you too, and now everything is changed
and you let your life go, like a bad gene or a slow virus.
You’ve bought the whole gypsy’s curse, the heroine’s undoing,
the fatal weakness inscribed in a hundred novels
you read as a girl in your sweet gabled bedroom
while you were waiting for your life to happen.”
Wow. What a masterful, virtuosic ending!
And then there’s “Coyote,” a great cautionary tale about how a man can take over your life.
Gray Jacobik, Eleanor (2020)
This is the book I most recently finished, sent to me by my friend Ann. She knew I would like its long biographical format and I did. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. But I can’t really isolate any single poems because it’s really one long, poem. The poems don’t even have titles but numbers.
I was able to fully imagine the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt and felt she captured the character and language of the time well.
But I also felt the poems could just as easily have been prose, or prose poems even. There wasn’t much going on with the line breaks or with the forms. They weren’t particularly poetic pieces, just straightforward moments excerpted to indicate a whole.
Example from #49:
“….Franklin died in
the Little White House in Georgia.
not the White House, and there beside him,
Lucy Mercer Rutherford, not me. What
a glorious and magical and ironical life…”
All very a matter-of-fact. Line breaks seemingly arbitrary. No great revelations at the ends, but only found in the poem as an epic.
The bio in the back notes Jacobik’s many illustrations previously done for this press, CavanKerry, but unfortunately one of them wasn’t used for this book, just the grainy black-and-white photo (which looks a bit cheap). Also, the author photo in the back is mostly the back of Jacobik’s head, almost Sia-like. Except you can find plenty of photos online so…kind of odd.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Animals in the House (2004)
I picked up this book at the college bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas. When I visit colleges I like to find their bookstores and see if they have local poets there, poets “writing about place.”
There were some good Kansas poems, including “Magnolia Tree in Kansas,” and “Burning the Prairie”
I liked the first poem, “Girl,” about girlhood, “Tricks of Gravity” about an accident (“how much damage gravity does/to the world all the time”), “Almost Totality: Partial Eclipse” and “The Dark Between the Stars” both sort of science-love poems, similar to her metaphysical nature poems, like “What Do You Believe In” and “Hills Climb the Sky” which ends with a scene of spreading someone’s ashen remains: “We spread what was left into the climbing wind/and let the turning of the planet do the rest.” And like in “What the Earth Holds” with “all the green that still comes.”
“Three Walking Songs for the Night” is a poem about destination and arriving, ending with “Sometimes rain falls. No matter./The animals come anyway./When it clears, I lie on the fallen grass,/look at the brave sky,/and tell myself, ‘shut up and trust that.'”
“Birthing Room,” “Telling My Son About His Birth” and “The Speed of Life” are all great, atypical motherhood poems.
“Spring Song,” the final poem encapsulates the spirit of the book:
“Meanwhile, insects reproduce themselves like breath,
birds loosen the sky with flight,
stratus clouds streak across the moon,
kisses stop, and stones break apart
so easily that it’s clear they’ve been cracked inside
for a long time. Each life a transference of water.
Each act just a way to move light around.
Even knowing this, why can’t the heart stop asking?”
Sharon Olds, Satan Says (1980)
So here’s a book I saw a friend reference recently on Facebook and I remembered it being such a milestone book mentioned at graduate school. I figured I should catch up with it. My copy was even a 45th Anniversary edition. Sharon Olds has a reputation for bold, emotional truths, breaking religious and sexual taboos to sort of “exorcize” her family trauma and hellfire Calvinist childhood. But other’s have labeled her sensationalist. You know as in confessional poets who go too far!
So I was expecting a kind of extreme candor that was really unreasonable to expect as a Gen X reader. So much more candor has happened since the book’s publication that I found the poems mild and a bit deflating. That said, I dogeared a lot.
Family trauma poems include “That Year” and the Lizzie Borden poem “Photographs Courtesy of the Fall River Historical Society,” “Republican Living Rooms,” “Indictment of Senior Officers” and “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure” in which the conspiracy of sisters in a violent home will foreshadow similar poems of Robin Becker’s book above.
There also are some good mother/daughter moments here, like in “Quake Theory” where Olds says “When two plates of earth scrape along each other/like a mother and daughter/it is called a fault.” She considers her own mother, herself as mother and her daughter’s point of view and sometimes combines them as in “Young Mothers V” where she says “you see the young mother/swimming over the threshold through silted air,/the soot falling like black rice. She is/struggling down the corridor, her own mother/hanging onto her ankles and bearing down.” Other great mother poems include “The Language of the Brag,” “The Possessive,” the meltdown in “The Unjustly Punished Child” and “The Mother.”
There are also good relationship and sex poems like “First Night,” “Feared Drowned,” “Privative” and an existential-dread-in-housekeeping poem, “The Housewives Watching Morning TV.”
From “Station” there are the lines, “We spent a long moment/in the truth of our situation, the poems/heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.”
Heidi Seaborn, Marilyn: Essays & Poems (2022)
I saw this in the bookstore, and like for the Eleanor Roosevelt book above, was interested in its biographical poems.
I guess this is an elegy but it felt more about the insomnia of its author and trying to find points of identification with Marilyn Monroe and her insomnia.
I only dogeared two poems. The first was “Following the Script” which ends with “The pills were clever that way. They could glad-hand/into any handbag, could have had their own show./They were producers all right./Despite what everyone ways, I follow/the script. I take directions.”
The other was “Insomniac’s Slumber Party” which is compiled from lines taken from a 1967 Judy Garland interview about Marilyn Monroe. Judy, Marilyn and “Poet” all have a three-way dialogue. They’re all three pill-popping insomniacs, you see.
But I like how the slumber party ends, with Marilyn saying “Turn off the light, bunny. Please let me sleep.”
Actually the most interesting thing about this book was reading all the drama going on behind the scenes with the publisher, which I learned from a 2023 thread that is now behind a subscription paywall.
Brooke Sahni, Before I Had the Word (2021)
This is a Cleveland poet now living in New Mexico (or at least she was by the time of this book’s publication). I can’t remember if I picked this up in a New Mexico bookstore or whether it came from a contest entry.
Lots of form experiments in this book and contemplations on language but I’ve only dog-eared a few pieces:
“On Absence” talks about how “My grandfather was not sent off to fight/but assigned to deliver news of the dead….He was a speech professor after the war,/teaching students to carve emphasis out of//language so something unnamable could take shape.”
“Book Arts” begins very juicy-like with:
“In the beginning there were the raw materials:
paper, ink, thread and glue. There were books
to help the class make books. What is a book?
intros asked and so many different forms:
accordion books, fold books, signature books.
We’ll start by talking about the body of the book,
the teacher said. The diagram showed a traditional
books with the head, spine, tail front board,
and black board. The book asked, How do we define a page?“
And what follows in the poem is more bookish delight.
I also liked “Casting, Pulling” with its second half of wondering about a new relationship:
“We are three weeks old–
I want to pull the stone
that will tell me all about
love’s believing,
that will articulate the process
of pulling, the way you
pulled pebbles from beneath
the water’s skin
because they felt right.”
And “The Golden Reserve” which is a long-lined, hodge-podge of family memory and food.
Prairie Rhythms, The Life and Poetry of May Williams Ward by Lana Wirt Myers (2010)
This is another book I purchased in Lawrence, Kansas, at the college bookstore. It’s a biography of a local Kansas writer who wrote about the dust bowl era. There are poems and pictures sprinkled through the book.
I’m always on the lookout for dustbowl-era poems, since the northeast corner of New Mexico was part of the dustbowl and my Aunts used to love to tell me about their dustbowl experiences in Roy, New Mexico.
I also like reading about obscure, regional poets.
One poems is called “Wheat Farmer” and ends with “Wife, do you know what I dreamed last night?/I dreamed I sweat great drops of dew/And they turned into gold, and I gathered them up/And gave them to you.”
And “Night in a Prairie Town” that begins, “We live in a bare little town on the plain./Yet we have a tree or two./And even a cottonwood’s leaves are lace/At night, when the moon shines through.”
Her weather poems are interesting, like “Tornado” where “The monstrous horn of a unicorn/Gored the world.”
“Spring in the Dust Bowl” is a short poem with the lines “Who paid the cost/Of living here, and the greater cost of leaving?/Even his path is lost.” Another dust bowl poem “Dust Bowl (A Sequence)” is pretty intense.
“Dust again. All our values are shaken
When earth and air reverse their functions,
When earth flies upward and the air presses downward, when earth is taken
And swirled in the sky, earth that should be massive and hard…
….What is earth?
Is there anything solid and sure? And what is air?
Is there sun anywhere?…
…we moved like sleepwalkers half alive.
Our hearts were dry inside.
Today when it rained we ran out doors
And stood and cried.”
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