Carnegie Mellon Press

73 pages, $15.95

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

The narrator in How I Went Red by Maggie Glover is fierce and unafraid to break wide open, share her intimacies, her scuffed-up linoleum, her junk drawers, her bank bills.  This voice comes from the kind of friend you’d crack open a beer with at a late-night kitchen countertop, lean over and tell the secrets of your worst day.  This kind of honesty builds a kind of trust for the reader, a take-off-your-coat-and-stay-a-while feeling.

So much of How I Went Red is yearning towards a new start, another envisioning of the self.  The poem “In West Virginia” begins:  “Each morning was a fresh, blue breakdown.”  In “A 350-Pound Man Receives Liposuction on Channel 43,” we observe the gruesome surgical transformation of not only the observed but the observer, ending, “I / was inside / my own skin, upon another bed // of record loss, a home I / made myself of blow-back and skin, inside— / how many hands to make a bed?”  Even dreams can refresh the narrator; in “Poem for a Night Shift”:  “I fall back into the dream / where I am among the red mountains, / a purple storm flashing:  an indulgent ordeal / of color and noise.  I awake with the dull impression / that something has happened, somewhere, again—” And then Glover gives us the Amnesia sequence, poems about forgetting to remember again. Continue reading →