Much gratitude to Jami Macarty for this beautiful, fierce review of WHIPSAW, and to NewPages for featuring it! Here is a snip--
"Bad things happen to girls and women in the forest, but not in these poems. “This is not a fairy tale.” Hurrah! Instead, the forest offers “detail of light and shade,” where our speaker takes solace among trees, and where “Like Thoreau alone // in the distant woods [she] come[s] to her[self].
Out of that recovery comes a desire “to pay tribute to the promise / of the future” which requires allegiance to both the “ancestral forest” and the next generation. Here is a poet who fights for her freedom, protests “deforest, // to develop,” and strives to be the “kind / of mother— / to gift [her] child / endurance and steady pace.”
In Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn uses language to cut in two ways—beyond the imperiled and “beyond the veil.”
You can read the full review HERE
