Molly Sutton Keifer Archives

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

Stephanie Pippin can turn a swoon-worthy phrase. Admittedly, I could spend the whole of my word count copying down the syntactical constructions Pippin created, but I will rein myself in with a few to share: “this sky of promiscuous wings,” “Their jeweled eyes lamp the ash,” “The red fruit, with its buds / Like a string of little time bombs,” “the green / throat of an elm,” “winter’s / blood clock counting / mice,” “The waves in their gray / Ruches remind me / Of tormented pigeons,” “stargazer / lilies wilt like angels / overthrown, a bed of throats / collapsing,” “sogged with August, / morels swelling like lungs.” These images are the sorts I collect, as if an ornithologist in the field, tucking samples into my notebook for the specimen tray at the museum.

Poems with wings: fifteen. Eggs: eight. Feathers: five. The last poem contains all three. Other words I could have counted: blood, death, bones.

Know too, that “his feathers / are holy things” and in a poem such as “Hatch,” “It is hard to give birth / to yourself.” Continue reading →

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 →

Molly Sutton Keifer

[REVIEW] The Messenger by Stephanie Pippin

[REVIEW] How I Went Red by Maggie Glover