Book review: Body, In Good Light by Erin Rodoni

In keeping with April's theme as National Poetry Month, I'm happy to review a lovely book of poetry by a former colleague of mine at Literary Mama, Erin Rodoni.

Erin was the assistant editor in poetry at LM until she had the double good fortune of giving birth to her second child and seeing her first poetry collection in print. Busy woman! Working with her for about a year, I appreciated her careful eye and wide range of poetic appreciation.

Both of these skills are on display in Body, In Good Light. Erin's poetry demonstrates deftness with a variety of styles while offering a clear, consistent voice. Body, in Good Light explores the tension between body and spirit, light and shadow in sensual, clear-eyed poems.

As the book's title suggests, the visceral aspects of the body undergird the poems ("sometimes meat, we dream"), particularly as the body loves, ages, battles disease, and gives birth to and nurtures new life. At the same time, poems revel in qualities of light, especially when imbuing the physical with an internal, spiritual glow, like "tomorrow's sun in her hair."

Erin's startling descriptions, such as "pureed carrots like lamb's blood on the door," made me imagine her as an impressionistic painter who can evoke external as well as internal landscapes by combining visuals, scent, texture, and sound. Check out these lines from "The Woman Who Is Your Mother":

I still love the unapologetic suck of a struck match
and the horse that joyfully bucks its rider no matter
how much shugar it lips from a palm. I know the woman
who is your mother will never forgive herself
for all the ways she has to break you
before the world can.

In the book's third section, motherhood sharpens questions of identity, physicality, and wonder as "the woman / who is your mother still marvels that roaming minerals / in her blood settled to form your bones." I also loved the lines: "Now that I'm never alone, / I suddenly am so // lonesome." Yeah, it's like that. At the same time:

the perfume of another sphere still rises from your body
while you sleep, sweet as the Technicolor sugar at the bottom

of a box of Trix.

Rich imagery, nuanced wordplay, and shifting layers of meaning reward multiple readings of this elegant collection.

Recent publications

How exciting! A review I wrote of three excellent books of poetry has been published on Literary Mama. Here's a sample:

In Mary Crockett Hill's poem "The Fat Cat," one line in particular stands out: "Someone should write a manual for avoiding random horrors." Although that manual may not exist, three recent collections of poetry--Mary Crockett Hill's a theory of everything, Amy Lemmon's Saint Nobody, and Rebecca Foust's Dark Card--address how mothers reconcile a world filled with beauty and pain, attachment and loss, especially when motherhood doesn't turn out the way we imagined it would be.

Also, the story of my first son's birth is going to be published in an anthology of birth stories sometime in the next couple of months. The editors have created a blog, with photos and clips (mine is down toward the bottom, if you scroll!). Can't wait to see the finished product.

All this activity reminds me that I'm more than just a milk machine/sandbox playmate...and one of these days I'll be back to creating some new works (or finally putting together the half-finished ones sitting in my "In progress" folders). Till then, I'm watching the two little guys grow bigger day by day...

Happy National Poetry Month!

Check out a mini-roundup I wrote for National Poetry Month on Literary Mama. I love to read and review books of poetry, and I hope to write more about the two books mentioned here: Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables and Marie Howe's The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. For now, this is just a taste!