Cataloguing Pain (YesYes Books, 2023)

Allison Blevins’ Cataloguing Pain reads like a worship of pain, which is a nod to the poet’s ability to morph agony into pleasure by shaping and re-shaping language—how, in a poem in which the speaker recalls that first “small burning” of desire between her thighs when she was a child thinking “just right about that girl on TV,” the only solution “was to rub the pain away.” (from “Pain as Caged Birds”)

Little Beast (Riot in Your Throat, 2023)

From the opening poem “Wolf,” Sara Quinn Rivara’s Little Beast reads like the fairy tales we know flipped on their heads. And I don’t mean the watered-down versions. I mean the Brothers Grimm versions. The fairy tales elders once told children to scare them into behaving. Only Rivara is a witch burned at the stake returning to teach women how to misbehave, thus coming home to themselves.