Age Brings Them Home to Me
windflower
Finishing Line Press, 2024, 45 pages
$19.99

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

In her collection Age Brings Them Home to Me, windflower uses the perspective from Mother Earth to see everything life offers: family, love, self-actualization, and justice.

In poems like “I am from the ocean” and “Seeds of Fear,” windflower tells the story of her family’s genealogy as if they were ocean tides. She writes, “I am from the ocean / of my mother’s womb / that liminal space:” (4). The colon at the end of the poem is intentional: it acts as a gateway to the ocean that is her family—the ever-flowing tides and sporadic waves.

“Seeds of Fear” is a prose poem grappling with the mixed feelings family can stir up, especially for queer people. Battling religious trauma, the speaker realizes that their family can be a source of comfort: “The trinity of us huddle on the dusty pink couch in absolution of love” (15). These familial poems ebb and flow like the ocean in content and theme.

In the same vein, love is explored in a romantic sense with the speaker’s voice informed by the natural world. “Canoe me into deep waters” excels in natural imagery: “rain me to the ground, / light breeze me along / the lips of river’s currents, / thunderstorm me lightening / my bones to stars, / serenade me with sweet corn / salty butter dripping / from my mouth” (17). The speaker considers their lover just as essential and beautiful as nature. My personal favorite romantic line imbued with natural imagery is: “kisses that melted glaciers / kisses that know neither season nor coast.” (20). Equating a lover with Mother Earth conveys a deep devotion and is wonderful for a reader to witness.

In addition to genealogy and romantic love, windflower uses her devotion to nature for self-growth. In an anti-capitalist stride, she writes, “But what about those days I just want / to be a leaf on a bough. Waiting / to turn red” (23). It makes sense for windflower to express this sentiment, as nature is in no hurry. Imagining the speaker as a leaf waiting for the gentle renewal of seasons is peaceful and healing.

One poem stands out in Age Brings Them Home to Me. In “My First History Lesson,” windflower recounts the story her tenth-grade biology teacher told her about her son being murdered in Mississippi for registering Black voters. windflower beautifully and concisely tells his story. Even though the subject matter is challenging, this poem aligns with the rest of the collection, since windflower includes her signature nature imagery: “their bloody hands / hollowed stars from the sky / and the moon went mad” (35).

Overall, windflower’s poems are powerful because they are rooted in nature: the most powerful source of creative inspiration. Readers will hear echoes of Mary Oliver in windflower’s poetic voice housed in a chapel in the trees.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is a Sinister Wisdom intern. She holds a BA in English and creative writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in CURIOUS Magazine and at Pearl Press.

The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich
Julie Weiss
Bottlecap Press, 2023, 32 pages
$10.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich by Julie Weiss is a dazzling poetic collection that revels in the majesty and resilience of lesbian love. The chapbook gorgeously echoes Adrienne Rich’s 1976 work, Twenty-One Love Poems, both in essence and in form, indulging us with tender vignettes of a budding relationship set in Spain. Brimming with lush, image-laden descriptions of love, the collection can be read as a tribute not only to Rich but to lesbian erotic histories.

Weiss imbues a potent sensuality throughout her collection, punctuating scenes of the daily mundane with a lust of cosmic proportions. In poem VI, the narrator is overwhelmed by the surging currents of desire: “Every / object I hand to you takes the shape / of rapture. We are two women / on a park bench, daydreaming, the space / between our hips unbearable” (6). The narrator aches for the touch of her lover, and this need for her lover’s embrace has become a basic necessity of life, much like food. This is strikingly distilled in poem II, where the narrator muses, “How, even before I learn the word for / starvation, mine navigates the expectation of your breasts, your belly, the placid trail / downwards” (2). The ebb and flow of all-encompassing desire is also mirrored in The Jolt’s poetic structure. Weiss’ poems are arranged in five sets of couplets, and the poet plays with the constraints of this framework with dexterity. The emotional intensity of her poems often pushes up against the borders of this structure, threatening to burst right off the page.

In the same breath, Weiss refuses sanitised depictions of lesbian love and does not shy away from portraying the tensions that come with being visibly queer. Public displays of affection are often disrupted by intruding scenes of casual homophobia and sexual harassment. In poem VIII, the narrator soberly recounts, “In London, a couple like us was harassed / on a bus. Assaulted. Kiss! they roared” (8). In poem XIV, a public kiss shared by the lovers provokes a “leer of ruffians” (15). However, the transcendent nature of the couple’s love resists heterosexist hostility with both radiance and vigour. The narrator declares in poem IX, “I’d write an ocean full of poems, pull / the haters under the surging tide of our love” (9). Weiss does just that. Her collection stands as a testament to the sheer strength and beauty of a love that knows no bounds. The Jolt is a feast for the heart.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She holds a BA in History from The University of Melbourne and is currently completing her Master’s in Arts and Cultural Management. She is also a musician and cultural worker. She is passionate about lesbian archiving, culture, and history.

unalone
Jessica Jacobs
Four Way Books, 2024, 210 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Sisel Gelman

unalone by Jessica Jacobs is a poetry collection about longing—a deep, profound longing for the meaning, guidance, and connection found in the intersection between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Jacobs takes the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis and revives the Old Testament with a refreshing series of personal stories and reflections that highlight the timelessness of our shared humanity across time and space with an emphasis on the contemporary now.

Throughout the text, Jacobs presents the urgency of the physical world with grace and vulnerability. Jacobs relates the lessons of the Bible to her upbringing, to her mother, to the love she has for her wife, and to the mundanity of life. The effect is magnetic, as the personal references trail into the sphere of myth themselves. Her personal stories become just as important and relatable as the stories of the Bible, maybe even more so. We see our own lives reflected in them. Jacobs also does not shy away from the topic of misogyny and racism in our day and age. The poignant references to injustice, mass shootings, and acts of overt antisemitism call upon the reader to reflect on the brokenness of the world and how it can begin to be healed. This is, once again, a world we recognize with our own eyes.

Jacobs embraces the magnitude of Genesis in her storytelling. She acknowledges how these stories feel larger than life and incorporates this grand tone and perspective into her literary style. Jacobs drops the audience right into the middle of biblical scenes so that they can experience the huge moments firsthand with all of their joys, stressors, and questions. The experience is made new again through a distinctive empathic lens. Jacobs asks herself how the underrepresented and silenced women of the Old Testament felt. She asks, “What was their perspective like?” It’s beautiful and touching to see these women gain a voice as Jacobs experiments with her own through unusual line placement and enjambment.

When I asked Jacobs why it’s important to talk about the intersection of queerness and feminism in terms of religion, she responded with the following: “Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, advises us to place a fence around the Torah. This is a means of guarding it, of making its teachings and traditions sacred (a word that literally means to set apart). But as I explore in unalone’s first poem, “Stepping through the gate,” such fences can often be barriers, keeping people out—a fact especially true for women and perhaps even more so for queer folks. So many of us were raised to believe that there wasn’t a real place for us in religion, except perhaps as mothers and helpmeets to men. Scholars and poets like Alicia Ostriker and Eleanor Wilner showed us how we can take these stories back, look into the holes in the text, to all the women's stories written there in invisible ink, and bring them out into the light. And as a queer woman, it feels important that I permitted myself to also see my own experiences reflected in these stories, as I hope it might also help others find their way back into traditions that are theirs if they want them.”

One of my favorite poems in the collection is titled “Creation Stories,” and it evokes the desire Adam and Eve had for each other. In the poem, there is a longing to be complete—to be larger than the sum of individual parts. Through the metaphor of human companionship, we peek at the urge to be reunited with a divine fullness that is telling of Jacobs’s intuitive inclination towards the holy. This poetry collection insists there is something powerful and elevated in the spiritual realm, and through study and reflection, we might attain a fraction of it. This fraction will guide and heal us. It will bring us closer to the meaning we seek in such a chaotic world. Love will save us: the love we have for each other, for ourselves, our traditions, our history, and the sacred.

Sisel Gelman was raised in Mexico City and moved to Alaska to write her first novel. Her writing has been nominated for two EVVY Awards, she has won an ICPA award, and #siselgelman has over 3.2 million views on TikTok. Sisel is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MA at the Bread Loaf School of English.

Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II
Julie Weiss
Bottlecap Press, 2024, 32 pages
$10.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Julie Weiss embodies the spirit and style of Adrienne Rich’s love poems in Volume II of Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich. Readers do not need to read Volume I to be enchanted by Weiss’s quaint love story, nestled away in a Pyrenean village, nor do Rich’s original poems need to be read to experience the narrative of lesbian longing that threads through this collection. Breath Ablaze is imbued with subtle storytelling, powdered sugar longing, and a thread of timelessness that delivers Weiss’s poems straight to the heart of any sapphic reader, young or old.

Weiss’s ability to subtly, yet powerfully create a narrative of her two central lovers feels like an old friendship that picks up right where it left off. In poem III, the narrator writes about her lover: “Does identity matter, anyway, / when beyond my bakery, the landscape is / undressing in the glimmer of your astonishment?” (3). Not only does the ambiguity of identity lend itself to the mystery that the narrator experiences, but also the reader’s participation in that mystery. With this intoxicating obscurity, how could one not keep reading?

Our narrator is a baker, and their creations are often paired with a sweet lesbian longing that they and the reader find themselves hungering for. In poem VI, the narrator muses, “Like the caramel-dipped / castaña de mazapán seducing your tongue” (6). The narrator’s lover is an outsider discovering the baker’s craft, which Weiss translates as a sensual exploration of desire. Beyond baked goods, Weiss incorporates sopa oscense (a popular stew in Huesca) into her poetry, having the narrator implore, “I’d happily mince all of me into a fusion / of flavors just to glide down your throat” (9). The same need for sustenance is conflated with the need for their lover’s touch.

Weiss’s love story, because it is short, subtle, and sweet, feels outside of time. This narrative could exist in any century, just as poem XIII ponders, “Say it were the 18th century…Would you / engrave my face on the wall separating us, / where your slashed breasts rested?” (13). This collection asks: would we have our same lovers, even our same desires, if time were a mere chance? Weiss answers: “Asombroso, how time and space conspired / to merge our lives” (21). It is both: time’s providence and chance led these lovers together, and, at the same time, leads readers to this exhilarating collection.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is a Sinister Wisdom intern. She holds a BA in English and creative writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in CURIOUS Magazine and at Pearl Press.

American Queers: Poems
Jesse Marvo Diamond
Červená Barva Press, 2023, 54 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

In American Queers, Jesse Mavro Diamond creates a guiltless queer kingdom of historiography and reclamation. The Charley Shively epigraph—“Our guilt ruins our pleasure”—sets the tone for a mythical adventure through queer resistance and liberation, honoring those who came before and those who will tread new waters in the future. Stormé DeLarverie, Richard Leitsch, Pat Parker, and Charley Shively are those who have come before, and with impressively researched biographical notes on each artist, readers of American Queers will surely step in stride with the story of these mid-century gay activists.

Prior knowledge of these historical figures is not necessary to enjoy these celebratory and elegiac poems of American queer liberation. Mavro Diamond expresses that her goal is to let readers “once again hear the beating of [the] full, red American hearts” of late queer leaders. She wishes to “infuse” her verse with the “rhythm” of the activists’ spirit. In this way, American Queers functions as a time capsule of queer reverence and tradition.

The poems in American Queers are historiographical in the sense that they track the lineage of the figures she models. In “The Night King Storm’s Lineage Was Proven,” Marvo Diamond recounts DeLarverie’s journey from birth to her involvement in the Stonewall Riots: “At 15 she started hitting back. / That’s how champions are born…Fast forward thirty-three years…when the NY cops went to gather gays / like cattle into the vans” (5). The poem is short and brief, but the lines convey clear and powerful storytelling. Marvo Diamond truly captures the spirit of DeLarverie’s energetic rebellion from birth to adulthood.

The very nature of American Queers implies a certain level of reclamation—reclamation of personhood, identity, and history. However, the section titled “Those Who Came After” is specifically geared toward this theme: “We The People: 1973,” which displays this most effectively. The poem, written as a “queer constitution” of sorts, reclaims what it means to be an American in a country where queerphobia is rampant. Mavro Diamond writes, “Courage is our undoing, they will be sure of that,” and “They cannot deny us our desire / Which is our hunger. / They cannot deny us our love / Which is our bread” (48-49). Here, Mavro Diamond defines American queerness as resistance and the fight for love.

I could not end this review without mentioning my favorite poem, titled “Lines,” from the “Muse: Pat Parker” section. This poem exceeded my expectations of what poems with borrowed lines can look like and accomplish. The piece blends Parker’s words and Marvo Diamond’s beautifully, creating a mosaic of queer experience that transcends time (23-27).

A diverse set of readers will enjoy American Queers. Those who lived through the mid-century gay rights movement will be transported back into the joys and hardships of twentieth-century queerness. For younger readers who often view their queer experience as starkly different from the lived experience of our late leaders, Mavro Diamond reignites this queer history. She speaks through the legacies of DeLarverie, Leitsch, Parker, and Shively, literally writing into their tradition and offering their influence to our modern minds.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is a Sinister Wisdom intern. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in CURIOUS Magazine and at Pearl Press.

The Weight of Survival
Tina Biello
Caitlin Press, 2024, 72 pages
$20.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Language, Smell, & Memory: Tools for Surviving Grief

Tina Biello’s The Weight of Survival tells the story of her Italian immigrant upbringing through free verse and prose poems, inviting the reader to experience her family’s village of Casacalenda. The collection is primarily, and poignantly, a love letter to her ancestry, her mother country, and her childhood home of British Columbia. Biello brings us along on her odyssey of remembrance—remembrance of herself, her family, and, of course, Casacalenda. In combination with her inclusion of folklore curses and proverbs as well as treating time as a transcendent force, Biello successfully writes grief as a form of survival.

Biello begins The Weight of Survival with an author’s note about language, or more specifically, the dialetto di Casacalenda, or, the dialect of Casacalenda. Biello creates a thread of her mother tongue throughout the collection that is not only functional and culturally significant, but lends itself to the powerlessness of grief in poems like “Say Good-Bye” and “The Call.” In the latter, Biello writes about her mother’s death. She translates her father’s words from dialetto di Casacalenda: “our language digs gardens, builds sheds, makes wine” (33). In contrast with her mother’s death, it is her mother’s dialect that continuously creates—it is a language that survives.

Beyond her use of language to portray grief, Biello employs smell and mortality to reclaim memory. Biello primarily uses scent as an agent for remembrance in poems such as “My Death,” “Last Poem about My Mother,” and “On the Last Day of the World.” Biello’s craft is portrayed in her vivid employment of smell to evoke powerful memories in contrast to her mother’s Alzheimer’s. She writes, “I will make sugo, make sure our home / smells like my mother’s kitchen. / Assuming she will be greeting me, / I will create an altar” (13). Smell is an extremely powerful tool for the brain in communicating memory, especially grief. Although her mom’s memory is deteriorating, the power of smell is not, and the memories it produces do not fade either.

Although lesbianism is not the primary theme of The Weight of Survival, Sinister Wisdom readers will particularly enjoy “She Brought Home Women,” “Ode to Rosetta,” and “Queer Dear.” The elements explored above such as memory, language, and grief are beautifully drawn out in these poems.

Biello’s storytelling shines in her prose poems, but their emotional depth is often lost. For example, “Lucia” beautifully captures the dissonance of being native to Canada but not feeling truly at home because of the dreary weather (24). Casacalenda, on the other hand, has bright and vibrant weather, which is more akin to the connotation of her middle name, Lucia. “The Corner Store” is a similar prose poem and includes experimentation with form: Biello includes a recipe for àglie e òglie (30). These poems, although they lack a sense of completeness and depth like the rest of the collection, are nevertheless enjoyable and interesting.

The close of the collection is somber yet beautiful, perfectly showcasing Biello’s thematic genius. “His Ashes” and “Silence” are triumphs. She reminds us that hope can be found through a reclaimed memory of loved ones, remembering that “the years have been long, but the loving good” (66). The Weight of Survival is not a collection to miss.


Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is a Sinister Wisdom intern. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in CURIOUS Magazine and at Pearl Press.

Next Time You Come Home
Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal
Black Lawrence Press, 2023, 120 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Yeva Johnson

Next Time You Come Home by Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal is a beautiful collection that transforms a mother and daughter’s correspondence into a lyrical tour de force on grief and connection while spotlighting big and tender moments of the last part of the twentieth century. The beautiful cover artwork subtly reinforces the layers of meaning within many of the poems.

Next Time You Come Home is organized in two parts. Part I serves as a contextualizing introduction to the poems that follow, which are based on letters from Lisa’s mother that Lisa rediscovers twenty years after Milly’s death. The reader is informed that Milly was an alcoholic who had experienced multiple losses due to life’s vicissitudes. Milly and Lisa corresponded extensively in the 1980s and 1990s so that Milly’s habit of writing the date and time of each letter shines a new light, showing that the daytime mother, who was a respected community leader, and the nighttime mother, under the influence of alcohol, were more closely related than Lisa realized. In the process of typing up Milly Dordal’s letters, Lisa Dordal performed what she described as “a sculpting exercise” and a “distillation process” to transform her mother’s written communication into a poetic form between letters and poems that elucidate the themes she shares with us—including the natural world, grief and loss, racism, sexism, and substance use disorders—while also capturing her mother’s voice so that we, too, can meet this complex woman who sacrificed her dream of being a writer to raise four children.

Part II, called “Not This, Not That,” comprises the letters as poems. All the poem titles refer simply to the month and year they were originally composed, as Lisa has already prepared us for the gaps in the letters that serve as a “lovely metaphor for” her “relationship with and understanding of” her mother. The poems cover the time period during and after Lisa came out to her mother as a lesbian, so that lines such as “I would be delighted if, someday, you had a special friend, / and we could meet her” from March of 1996 demonstrate the tender way a mother shows her love for her queer daughter. Lisa deftly carries on her mother’s quirky sense of humor with lines like “How are your plants doing? / Mine are experiencing strange deaths” and “It rained many inches on Friday and Saturday – / if it had been snow, it would have been awful. / Instead it was only depressing.” One wonders if Milly intended a joke with “Play Reading is tonight: Awake and Sing by Clifford Odets. / It’s about a dysfunctional family. Dad has a role”.

Lisa privileges readers with a view of this intimate relationship that overlapped by the thirty-six years while they were both alive in lines like “…You were 10 when I started drinking, / maybe 9. I’ve put you through a lot of pain” and “Draw me a picture of your Oak chairs, so I can picture you / sitting, writing, reading in them –.” Milly and Lisa Dordal share their blend of letter poems with everyday life details that make them relatable to readers today, such as when they write, “we should be able to have a good time – / if we avoid discussing politics or evolution. / Maybe we can reminisce about the 50s” and “I’m sure the cookies will be crumbs, / but they were sent with love.” There are many other poems and many lines that are a pleasure to read and can be savored again and again.

Lisa Dordal honored her mother by making her a coauthor of the collection. These lines from a February 1990 poem sum up my admiration for this collection and this mother-daughter poetry duo: “I love the ‘Broken Pitcher’ notecard you sent. / The woman in the painting reminds me of you (and me).” Make Next Time You Come Home a part of your poetry library for a ready source of comfort and a reflection on love and loss.


Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Her debut poetry chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, is available at Black Lawrence Press.

Disclosure: Nomadic Press published Yeva Johnson’s debut chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, in 2023; Nomadic Press stopped operations the same month that Analog Poet Blues was released. Black Lawrence Press is now the publisher of Analog Poet Blues. The review author, Yeva Johnson, is also published by the publisher of Lisa Dordal’s book.

The Price of a Small Hot Fire
E.F. Schraeder
Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2023, 106 pages
$13.95

Reviewed by Yeva Johnson

I looked forward to reading E.F. Schraeder’s The Price of a Small Hot Fire, but when I read the author’s note, I stopped short. Horror poetry gives me pause. I love poetry, but I am one of those people who do not like horror, whether in film or written variety. I am haunted for years after any encounter with this artistic form, so I have been careful to curate and limit my exposures. While intellectually I knew that, as E.F. Schraeder says, “Horror poetry, like other horror media, provides a path to explore what frightens us with a distance that affords safety,” I am always spooked because I understand all too well that “Whether understated or blood-soaked, a horror poet’s personal take and artistic license may yield an intensity of pitch or punch that offers unusual or uncomfortable discovery.” It was an act of bravery for me to dive into Schraeder’s poetic world without rules, where no topic was off limits. Luckily, my bravery was handsomely rewarded.

The Price of a Small Hot Fire is E.F. Schraeder’s first full-length poetry collection, and they supply us with a panoply of poems in various forms with interlocking and overlapping themes replete with images of spells, witches, knives, hearts, fires, lions, Frankenstein, Narnia, stones, bone, wind, water, and ash that underlie a queer feminist take on mothers, estrangement, trauma, and grief. In the poem “Postmarked From Nowhere,” Schraeder taps into the particular sources of fear that writers and poets experience when a mother character serves as a metaphor for how our lives are marked by others, in lines like “She inserted commas into adolescence / until I craved erasers and disappearing ink.” In “Confessions of an Avon Lady’s Daughter,” the mother says, “I feel naked without makeup,” but in this kindhearted portrait, this same mother, when asked by the speaker to teach them how, replies, “No. I don’t want you to feel like that.” The poet repeatedly shares the pain of trauma with lines like “sliced into muscle with weights and blades” and the heady lack of fear at “the sensuous rush / of standing on the edge of cliff,” so it is only fitting that in a later poem Schraeder gifts us with the antidotal line “In the garden, I plant the cure for everything” to assuage our tender nerve endings.

In another poem, the poet reminds us that a mother is not wholly a monster with the tender lines “I leapt over each sidewalk crack / my youth spent on checkerboard moves / in the chess of childhood / where I always lost.” But, this is a horror collection, and one of the most horrifying poems is “Necessary Tools for the Reinvention of a Relationship,” where Schraeder transforms everyday objects into suppliers of fear and danger, so that “One crystal vase” will forever terrify me. “Cherry Blossoms (Mourning A Distant Mother)” captures the essence of estrangement and loss: “No one else grieves what’s always been gone.” By the time the reader comes to the poem “Forgiveness Spell” they are ready to ponder all the dimensions of Schraeder’s question, “Is loss so different than love?” Schraeder never drifts into the overly sentimental, but rather weaves layers upon layers of meaning within and between lines that pack a punch.

Whether or not one is a fan of horror, poetry, both, or neither, The Price of a Small Hot Fire is well worth reading and reading again. This insightful collection of horror verse leaves us ruminating on every mother, every fire, every fear, every love, allowing us to reflect and so be nurtured by Schraeder’s work. Read The Price of a Small Hot Fire, and you will likely find yourself agreeing with E.F. Schraeder when they say “Life is full of poetry and horror. It’s up to any of us how closely we choose to look.”


Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Her debut poetry chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, is available at Black Lawrence Press.

Floating Bones
Rae Diamond
First Matter Press, 2023, 92 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Yeva Johnson

Rae Diamond’s Floating Bones is a magnificent multisensory experience fitting for this hybrid book of poetry, art, and essays. I invite any reader to enjoy it as I did from the first touch to the last page. To hold Floating Bones in your hands is a sensual pleasure, the velveteen surface of the front and back covers will caress your fingertips as you admire the intriguing cover art graced by the rib cage and spine of a skeleton with scattered butterflies at the entrance of an open door to a cloud-filled sky, while the back cover sports a smattering of even more lepidopters. Open the book and see that Rae Diamond has offered a multiplicity of their gifts as both poet/writer and artist. The poem “forward” tells us the author wrote these poems “without a home,” “when everywhere was a door,” and invites us to “come / in / come / in / come / in.”

I recommend you read this book for the first time as I did, from cover to cover, allowing you to enjoy the beautiful drawings of bones of various animals, body parts, and other objects that could be found at the seashore or that might drop from the sky. Rae Diamond’s exquisite illustrations are sometimes exact anatomical depictions of the natural world and at other times fanciful renderings of imagination on paper, like teeth with wings or butterfly wings that protrude from a backbone. Some of the bones are in shapes that may not be familiar, so it was fun to guess which part, animal, or object it might be. Diamond includes an index of illustrations in the extensive endnotes which provide correct answers to all the guesses.

Read the book again and you’ll notice that some of the poems complement the illustrations by mimicking their form and some of the illustrations seem to adorn the poems and inspire their lyric imagery. There are double delights in simply reading the book through visually to enjoy the artwork and then reading it again by looking at the book’s pictures while appreciating the shapes of the poems as well as how many poems have some words printed in faint gray ink. These turn out to be delicate poems-within-poems which Rae Diamond labels bone poems, also graciously indexed in the endnotes. They also included short lines that are crossed out and upside down on pages which serve as solemn meditations on home and underpin our understanding of the poems, essays, and art throughout the book.

You are now ready to read Floating Bones again with a focus on all the words and their layered meanings and the new words that Rae Diamond invents that add textures and rhythms, such as in the poem “windstepping” where you’ll find the gorgeous “here among this shimmerrhythm of frogs singing / for eggs to fructify a chorus of confirmation.” In “Enchanted telephone” enjoy lines like “at dusk deft bats / might / careen / through / echoecho / locating insects” as they drape the page like a delicate lace. Notice in “we will echolocate this moment” how Rae Diamond flows from line to line, accelerating until landing at a satisfying “k”. Read the book again, this time aloud, to understand how the sonic energy of Diamond’s work complements their art in both poetic and drawn forms. Floating Bones is filled with Rae Diamond’s compound words and phrases like “sunscorch,” “dogwag in boat,” “twilighthush,” “spiritshatter,” and “windstir” in the poem “wing through walls.” In “your head is opening” the whole poem becomes a pleasure for mouth and tongue as you read aloud lines like “a buzzbunch of bees / bumble dances the dust out / from under your diaphragm.”

Toward the end of Floating Bones, Rae Diamond includes an essay entitled “dialogues of belonging: the complicated act of taking up space on a finite planet” and the endnotes provide additional information about Diamond and her family and the themes of having a home, being without a home, and feeling at home and link these ideas with broader social issues such as affordable housing, the climate crisis, and land stewardship. Rae Diamond’s writing is so evocative you feel that you are part of the scene in poems like “end of summer,” or you feel that you can almost touch a feather or an artistic fish skeleton, detailed and beautifully decorated all at once. Read Floating Bones to yourself, enjoy the ripples over your vision. Read Floating Bones aloud and enjoy the ripples over your ears and tongue. Read Rae Diamond’s Floating Bones many times and be prepared to “linger / in / mystery” long after you’ve closed the book’s pages with a deeper understanding of what it means to be unhoused.


Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Her debut poetry chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, is available at Black Lawrence Press.