After reading Maud Martha earlier this year, I expected that I would enjoy Brooks’ first collection of poetry more than I did her prose. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I found much of this collection simplistic in an almost juvenile way and lacking the emotional and technical precision I look for in poetry. There were a handful of poems that managed to stand out due to their weighty subject matter and strong thematic progression (e.g., “the mother,” “Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” “the murder”), but there weren’t enough gems in the collection to make this book truly shine.

To me, the best poetry collections are those that provoke me to think deeply and feel deeply. While this collection felt like it had the potential to do both, it never quite lived up to that potential. The authors too often prioritized intellectual musing over emotional resonance and emotional meandering over thoughtful use of poetic technique which resulted in a work filled with enough sparks of emotional and intellectual depth to keep me reading but not enough to have a deep emotional or intellectual impact. Despite not loving this collection, I still recommend giving it a try if only to bear witness to a reasonable attempt to argue for the centering of lesbian perspectives and experiences in the poetic canon.

Magnetic and expansive, these poems almost seamlessly thread together the sacred and the sensual, the liminal and the tangible, the spiritual and the physical, the extraordinary and the mundane. Izenson’s linguistic precision grounded in gripping, embodied earthy verb and metaphor usage sent chills down my spine on almost every page and drew me into the cosmic collaboration of creation in ways I didn’t expect. While these poems are so unlike most of the poetry I love and included some portions I couldn't fully wrap my head around, I found that, overall, these poems offered a lot of liberation for me as a reader, writer, and dreamer of different worlds. If you can handle trans Jewish surrealism and sexuality, if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to experience a dream while wide awake, if you can appreciate the space where pleasure and pain overlap, then perhaps, you’ll find these poems offer some liberation for you as well.