Sundress Reads: Review of Swallowing Stones

As a collection, Lisa St. John’s Swallowing Stones (Kelsay Books, 2023) is meticulously organized: the first section looks inward, reflecting on the speaker’s youth with a focus on her fraught relationship with her mother that the speaker never seems to know what to make of. Her mother’s death leaves the speaker at an even deeper loss. The second section travels further outside the speaker, exploring societal ideas including feminism and environmentalism. The third and final section straddles the line, simultaneously going as far as outer space and traveling deep inside the speaker’s self. This section muses about death, the universe, and, interestingly, color. Poems like “Noise” and “There is No Color Without Light” use colors to examine the speaker’s physical environment and illuminate its relationship with the speaker. The speaker’s strong voice moves seamlessly through all sections of the collection, reflecting on her past, present, and future, especially as it relates to her husband, who lost his life to cancer.

Swallowing Stones wastes no time cutting into deep truths about the speaker’s world. The collection seems to have little energy for secrets or ambivalence. As painful as it is, the speaker views their past as an integral part of their life and thus remains in touch with it. She comes ready to talk about the death of her beloved husband. She comes ready to talk about her place as a woman in a world ready to make women statistics. She comes ready to talk about how art, space, and colors move her mind and shape her universe. In keeping with this brand of fearlessness, the poet is unafraid of abstractions. St. John makes heavy use of words such as “love,” “agony,” and “patience” that, as young poets, we are often taught to avoid. St. John clearly considers this fear of abstractions restrictive, which surprised and intrigued me about her work. 

These ideas are perhaps most potent when abstractions shake hands with more concrete images. In “The Potency of Thought,” the speaker explores the machinations of her own mind, reporting, “The bones of my brain have not yet been picked clean” (St. John 13). The speaker goes on to welcome life’s pains in “Symmetry of Loss.” She insists that “Remembering means living inside a prayer” (23), and taking in the pain of the death of loved ones—rather than avoiding it—leads to flourishing growth.

The collection is full of more seemingly opposed ideas as readers move through the speaker’s journey. St. John is not only conscious of these paradoxes, she appears to revel in them: “Hatred is just the awkward side of love,” she concludes in “Dressing Mom” (6). Hardness and softness, joy and grief, life and death all join in a dance throughout the collection.

Swallowing Stones looks at trauma as a part of life, like stones at the bottom of a river. But instead of being weighed down by these stones, or trying to escape them, St. John confronts them, swallowing them whole, transforming into something new and bright. In “There Must Be a Science to This,” the speaker resolves to “find the puzzle’s missing piece and eat it in remembrance of you,” concluding “[she] was not made to be complete.” For all its musings about death, the collection overall marches in the direction of rebirth. The opening lines of the final poem, “Dear Love,” a letter to the speaker’s late husband, seem to address this most directly:

I was afraid

that when you died,

no one would call me Lily any longer.

They would recall my paper name

and I would become Lisa again, and Lily would die, too.

But I am both

still

here. (St. John 73) 

St. John’s earnest, consistent reflections on the self urge us to look inward. Her poems at once feel like a thousand blooming flowers and a thousand solemn prayers. May we keep Swallowing Stones’s audacious approach to our personal growth as we find our own stones to swallow.

Swallowing Stones is available from Kelsay Books

---

Whitney Cooper holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, where they served as editor-in-chief of Jelly Bucket, the graduate literary journal run by the university. They also work as a reader for Atlanta Review. A clerical error was made while earning their bachelor’s degree, and they have been passionate about poetry ever since. Their poetry appears in Glassworks Magazine, Stillpoint Literary Magazine, Calliope, Right Hand Pointing, and SHARK REEF. They live in metro Atlanta with their wife, cat, and miniature schnauzer mix.