octavia_cade's review
4.0
A beautiful little chapbook of poems, and one that I think really successfully exploits the chapbook form. There's a noticeable repetition in some of these poems, similar words and phrases, and because the collection is so compact this comes across as a deliberately unifying feature (as I suspect it is meant to be), and one that transforms the small individual poems into pieces of a whole. If this were a full length collection of poetry, that repetition would perhaps seem a little more laboured, but because everything here is so very concise, it sharpens the individual pieces rather than blunts them. There are so many little scalpel lines that stand out to me here: the mermaid imagery in "terracotta soldiers," the nonhuman footprints in "the dogs of Rotterdam," and the similarity of resurrection and extinction in "hoarfrost harvest." Just a really enjoyable read, full of lovely prose.
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