A beautiful collection of poetry haunted by wildlife and wild
traumas, ghosts of pain and guilt intermingling with the aftershocks of death
and tentative looks ahead to futures unwritten. Those glances ahead are not
always hopeful and promising, but they’re not all desolation and gloom either.
Mottolo balances the painful actions of the past with steady, consistent progress
through the weird coping mechanisms humans put in place when things go wrong.
Every poem has at least one line that slips through the ribs
like a dagger, unexpectedly and halting the mind in place as the poem proceeds without
us. Hurry to catch up and you’ll usually find another. Mottolo’s poems use unflinching
imagery to explore the mundane details of day-to-day life, day-to-day death, like
in “White Plates” where a mother casually discusses her miscarriages while slicing
up sandwiches into smaller and smaller shards “like newborn mice” for her children
who survived. Or the fantastic line in “My Mother Drank Black Coffee” in which
Mottolo states the coffee “swung her through the day like an ax with a loose
head.” The black and white of life, both visceral with unsettling uncertainties
and grim realities. All with incredibly subtle but dynamic wordplay.
The collection covers a range of despair, exploring gender
roles, the way memory works to hide or alter our past, fathers and men who are all
too often indifferent to curiosity or the pain of others, aftereffects of
parental choices, expectations of familial warmth unmet, self-doubt in the face
of inevitability, the detoxification process to rid ourselves of these pains—a cornucopia
of the little hells of life. But balanced against the imagery and symbolism
provided by birds and insects, winged creatures that offer meaning and mystery,
there’s a collection that lifts and examines much more than wallows or wails.
It’s a rounded, mature, and hopeful collection even in its darkest moments.
Find How to Monetize Despair by Lisa Mottolo here.
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