Unmentionables: Poems
A pretty babysitter’s boyfriend gives a young, nightgown-clad girl in her charge a ride on his motorcycle, thus igniting the wild heart of a poet. Or so Fennelly describes in a poem titled “When Did You Know You Wanted to Be a Writer?” Insouciant, sexy, funny, and dead-on, Fennelly crafts perfectly metered lines and quick-turn stanzas steeped in the blues and rock and roll in which she riffs on sights, sounds, and moments at once ordinary and suffused with implication. As in her fire-burst collection Tender Hooks (2004), motherhood is addressed with earthy directness, but Fennelly’s imagination runs rampant here as she writes with sass and purpose about the plague of kudzu, and the difference between cold and correct Illinois and hot and sly Mississippi. She also pays incisive tribute to the painter Berthe Morisot in a startlingly empathic series of concise and slashing poems, and to poet John Berryman in the complex “Dream Song Cycle.” A true pleasure to read, Fennelly is gloriously womanly, dancing-on-the-table daring, and supersmart. --Donna Seaman--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.