ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she likes to rock climb. She is the author of four full length poetry collections and twelve chapbooks. Recent work can be seen at or is forthcoming from The Pinch, Cleaver, Yalobusha Review, Zone 3, and Grist. Her poetry reviews have been published in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Ploughshares Blog, Agape, Whale Road Review, and other places. She also hosts an indie reading series sponsored by the non-profit organization Iowa City Poetry called Today You Are Perfect. Find her at her website.
You are Safe in My Heart Frances, a micro review of Frances and Martine by Hilda Sheehan
Frances and Martine
by Hilda Sheehan
Dancing Girl Press, 2014
The poems in Frances and Martine (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) by Hilda Sheehan, (and charming drawings by Jill Carter,) exude a child-like joy even when debating killing a character by giving them corn remover to drink. All of the titles are simple: The Dream, The Disabled Animal, The Goose, The Knitters, etc, but these prose poems are anything but one note. Some of the ideas explore belonging, saying the right thing, the value of friendship, and feeling your own glow — even if you glow so much you float down Aisle 9 in the Supermarket and make everything in the aisle glow along with you and you get swept up into space because you have so much glow. Like the whimsical energy in the poem The Glow, in The Knob of Butter, Frances grows quiet over a series of days and eventually only says “My life is a knob of butter,” until she goes to the doctor and then a psychiatrist because that is all she says. Eventually, everyone in the world just believes in butter, not God or each other or anything else. These poems are funny, irreverent, sad, and this is one of my favorite chapbooks.
Visit Dancing Girl Press' Website
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
