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Review by Amy Small McKinney

In Nicole Greaves’ book, Having Witnesses The Illusion, the first poem, “Prelude” from Section I. Another Country invites us into her world of deep imagery and lyricism joined with storytelling. Though you know nothing about this world and the person she is addressing yet, you learn quickly that the search for others, connection in the midst of disconnection, and the desire to be both part of and out of this world is a central theme. In this introductory poem, Greaves begins with a girl’s love of horses:

There was a year when you thought of nothing

but horses, from wild mustangs to thoroughbreds,

And then, the first mention of language, how it is both “arrow” and forgiveness:

For a year you felt too massive to stay,

too wounded to move forward. You listened for bells,

for the precision in a sentence that held the shape of an arrow,

one that knew how to find the heart

Until finally, the possibility of connection:

It was then you began to realize that there might be others

who thought they could become horses too, and you called to them (1).

Throughout this book, Greaves also alludes to dark and light, hidden and revealed. In “Conventicle,” there is “Moonlight, the crack of stone / inside a hidden doorway” and “no men // for miles, only us, here / in this country between countries, // in this light of refuge” (2).

In “Sacks of Scarabs, Greaves continues this theme of dark and light, foreign and hopeful belonging as she and her mother held hands through the museum:

The museum’s glass box was hidden from light

            in between the hopeful columns, the scarabs swarming in a pool

            of fabric. Somehow they made the presence of my mother’s body

            more familiar, in the way her shadow made it more foreign (3).

This sense of foreignness linked arm and arm with togetherness continues throughout the book

in many disguises, including and especially, the power of language. For example, in the poem, “Mine,” Greaves writes, “Through the keyhole of my ear / where I was locked in / to what my mother and tía / were saying, the disagreement / of their silhouettes / in their first language, / language of sails and conquest, / where azul is closer / to the blue in fire, / hija closer / to the thread in daughter, / and mía closer to mine” (4).

Greaves often weaves Spanish into English, including when her beloved mother tries out idioms in English, saying: “Don’t look a dark horse in the mouth”(5). As a child, a teacher scolded Greaves for rolling her r’s too much, an allusion to her mother tongue. Greaves uses language to highlight lack of language, words like “stutter” and “the anticipation of sound.” And she returns to the horse frequently, whether in lines from “Caning”: “When he tightened the strands he leaned // back as if pulling on reins, the horse / the night before him when silence / magnifies the anticipation of sound” (13). And to the sense of being different—an outsider listening in, an outsider wondering: Will I always be the sum / of my poverty? (11)

Section II. The Waiting Room, confronts other ruptures, the loss of the beloved dying mother as well as the author’s own miscarriage where, after watching a child and father at a playground, she says during her own winter, “this is the sugar the body craves.”  (41)

In this section focused on grief, the title poem, “Having Witnessed The Illusion” is written in tercets, emblematic of mother, daughter, and death waiting in the wings, and returns us to the same sense of struggling to see inside, through a peephole or listening from outside a door: “to reveal just enough to say there was more // in the way a knitted sweater is a series of portholes, / and the body, the ocean, the thing contained / in its projection, a ship in a bottle, a cancer in its cell, // or the waiting room itself. (29)

In “Moments In The Trees,” Greaves continues:

when the mind is years ago

            in the village that no longer is

            a village, thinking of that boy who no longer is

            a boy. Her brow furls like someone

            blowing into a reed

            to push music through, tightening

            the pitch into its eye, sharpening

            until the voice is gone. (45)

Greaves finds her way back to her mother,  through her mother’s words that become her own in Section III Reclaimed. In “Awakening To My Mother’s Voice From Beyond:” Maybe, hija, you should go to the / planetarium today and watch the universe / expanding (55).

Greaves moves her readers away from the peephole, away from the porthole, away from the small openings between herself and the world, including the mother’s world before America, and into something larger. Now there are doors and windows into the world, a house painted “cerulean blue / like the house in my mother’s story, // the one in her village, made of water,” and then: “In this house, my mother said, // there are no masculine or feminine words, / the spoons were always joyous // and women always safe.”  (“Mi Casa” 57)

And in “Sorting Through My Inheritance,” Greaves admits: “Sometimes there’s no translation. / A word so much a word that you can’t speak it. More taste. Filament.” and how “All through adolescence, I was always both awake and asleep. / You would ask me:¿Entiendes?/ Then quickly remembered English: Do you understand?/ “Entiendo, Mamá.” And finally, “After you are dead, I’m happiest becoming you.” (73)

And as a mother to her own children, Greaves, in “Epilogue,” while painting wooden boxes, tells her readers, “Then we went to the fields / to be with the horses, but we could only hear them. // The smallest muñeca said to me, / You can’t tell if they’re coming or going.” She answers: “No, my lovely little nut, I said, / they are one and the same.” (75)

By the end of the book, Greaves has brought us full circle, moving us from the experience of being different, to loss, and to finally finding what she has gained and who she has become. In struggling to understand her single mother’s immigrant experience, and her own shuttling between languages and profound sense of feeling like, and being viewed by others, as an outsider, we journey with Greaves as she, daughter, teacher, mother, and writer, moves closer to belonging. “In the last bench in Meeting I am / all the other women” (“Faith And Practice” 63).

Nicole Greaves’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary reviews––including SWWIM, Cleaver Magazine, Matter Poetry, American Poetry Review; Philly Edition, Radar Poetry––and was awarded prizes by The Academy of American Poets and the Leeway Foundation of Philadelphia. She was a finalist for the 2020 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest and a 2015 finalist for the Coniston Prize of Radar Poetry, who also nominated her for The Best of the Net. She was selected by Gregory Orr as the 2003 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. 

Reviewer: Amy Small McKinney: Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus (2011). Her second full-length book of poems, Walking Toward Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize 2016 (Glass Lyre Press). Her chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, was written during COVID 2020 and her husband’s death (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Her poems have been published in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, The Indianapolis Review, The Inflectionist Review, Baltimore Review, Pedestal Magazine, SWWIM, Persimmon Tree, ONE ART, and The Banyan Review, and she has contributed to several anthologies, including Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and Stained: An anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023), among others. Her poems have also been translated into Romanian and Korean. Her book reviews have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. She has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and currently resides in Philadelphia.

Review by Anna Huber

Esprit de Corpse is a unique tale of adventure and mystery set in a french steampunk setting, largely separating the book from novels that traditionally place the steampunk universe in England or America. The novel makes use of different religion, socioeconomics, and even languages to both fill the book with depth and richness.

Esprit de Corpse begins with introducing the reader to the two protagonists of the book, Jacqueline and her sister Angélique. One may want to continue reading the book purely for fascinating characters. These two draw the reader into the story vivaciously, captivating readers with their quirks, flaws, and overall passionate personalities. Their story begins with a train ride and an automaton that literally falls into their path- a scene which both brings to light how skilled Jacqueline is with machinery, but also begs the first question, is this a story about ghosts in the machine?

From there, the mystery and intrigue continues to build as an unknown man breaks into Jacqueline’s workshop and attempts to steal back a component from the automaton. Though his plan is stopped by a quick thinking Angélique, there is more to this man’s plans and his motives than meets his eye, and before too long he becomes another intriguing character and suggestive love interest.

Then, in an attack, Angélique is kidnapped- or as luck would have it- secretly rescued. Jacqueline is then tasked with two difficult tasks- rescue her sister while trying to discover the mysteries of the automaton who brought the struggle and bad fortune to her and her sister. Joined by a lively and heroic Torque warrior, Jacqueline races to beat a mysterious Count whose ties to her family go further than even she realizes.

One of the masterful things accomplished by Esprit de Corpse is the commentary provided on traditional ideas about female autonomy and women’s possession of their own body. Trigger warning, the book does deal largely with themes of sexual assault and rape, offering a unique view and imagery of how it can effect both the body, the survivor, and family members of survivors. Note, the way this material is handled in the novel may be disturbing to some readers, but the ultimate message of how it can change a person is not to be overlooked. However uncomfortable the topic may be in the novel, it is worth noting that some may agree with the unorthodox and even uncomfortable opinions held by characters- opinions that some survivors may side with. The book also works to provide views of how many women working in predominantly male-led fields may feel in trying to forge paths of their own.

Ultimately though, the book does work to find coalition and common ground between good people- women and men alike- all fighting to stop a common evil and bring peace back to their home. By the end, families both unite and grow. Through pain, hardship, and bravery, the book does end with a fulfilling resolution- completed with even a few good and unpredictable twists. Unity is a word that captures the message of the book, as well as best conveys the real spirit behind Esprit de Corpse.

EF Deal lives in Haddonfield, NJ with her husband and two chow chows. Her work has been published in a variety of ezines and anthologies as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She is assistant fiction editor at Abyss&Apex and video editor for Strong Women ~ Strange Worlds.

Reviewer: Anna Huber: Anna Huber is a Graduate Student in the MA in English Literature Program at Monmouth University in New Jersey. Her love for literature began at a young age as her mother was (and still is) an English teacher who read to her often and imparted to her a love of stories. She plans to pursue a career in higher education and impart an understanding and greater respect for literature to future students.

Review by Susan Williams

The poetry collection Gala by Lynne Shapiro is a transcendent collection exploring in detail the intricacies and themes of art by using a few specific works pictured in the book to guide the reader through her experience. Akin to taking a slow walk through a gallery, the reader is pulled along by a thread as the collection circles around and back again, creating an image all its own using themes of discovery, recollection, and identity. Throughout each reading of this collection, readers will find themselves discovering something new and exciting, perhaps an image they had glazed over or a connection from one piece to another. This collection is beautifully unfolding onto itself into a larger and more complex work of art. Over the course of the collection, works tie and weave into one another creating a delicate and sophisticated braided structure that keeps the audience anticipating the next strand and wondering how its themes will further expand and saturate the collective themes of musing and art.

Shapiro uses physical pieces of art as framing devices for her poetry throughout the collection, often showing them in photographs to give the reader an image to ground themself in while they read, but it often is presented after the text, which seemingly gives the reader an option to read it in their own way, they can choose to look at the presented image and factor that into their reading experience or choose to form their own image based on the text alone. It is also important to note how Shapiro uses the page space, allowing for the text to have whatever space it needs in order to breathe and hold its full effect. It frames each of the paragraphs like a piece of artwork hanging on the white walls of gallery, much mirroring the subject matter of the collection itself and yields to just a slight disruption of the eye that keeps the audience guess and looking for more. Throughout the work, you can take note of how Shapiro sees art and the reverence with which the admires different pieces, and yet also see glimpses into her wit as she includes asides throughout the collection as cheeky jokes between her and the audience themselves.

Throughout the book I found several lines to be irreverent and particularly hard-hitting. In “The Gala Apple” the audience is given two simple lines, “Is the original sin the desire for originality? – Is it the immortality that we’re after?” It is this two lines I find will resonate in the hearts of all people who desire to create or consume art in any medium, as all art stems in at least some capacity from originality. There is this ongoing idea of the apple and sin throughout the collection, which ties back not only into christian mythology but is connected to so many other mythological beings in the collection as it clings tightly to the themes of temptation.

I would greatly recommend “Gala” by Lynne Shapiro to everyone I know who has appreciated art in their life time. For both poetry aficionados and to those who are rather unfamiliar with the genre, this collection is an excellent read to get you thinking about the nature of art and how it is created, not to mention what it all means on both a worldly and personal scale. “Gala” highlights the importance of the consumption of art in our everyday lives and how doing such can build connections and widen our view to a perspective beyond our own sometimes narrowed views of the world.

Lynne Shapiro is a poet and essayist living in Hoboken New Jersey.  Originally from Ozone Park, Queens, Lynne moved to Culver City, California when she was a pre-teen. She studied Comparative Literature at San Diego State and Brandeis University, where she earned an MA.  After graduate school, she moved to New York City to work at Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishing company.  For over a decade she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was a member of the faculty at Parsons/The New School in New York and at Hudson County Community College in New Jersey.  Culture and nature intertwine in her work to reveal a desire for wildness, magic, rootedness and authenticity.

Reviewer: Susan Williams is a graduate of Susquehanna University and writes fiction.