Sundress Reads: Review of Incidental Pollen

Ellen Austin-Li, in her latest collection, Incidental Pollen (Madville Publishing, 2025), delivers an emotionally rich collection of poems devoted to the tensions between grief, trauma, and memory. With dazzling metaphors and an acute sense of imagery, Austin-Li asserts herself as a poetic prowess capable of tackling complex poetic forms while navigating dual timelines and narratives encompassing a lifetime. Runner up for the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, this collection anchors itself to what we all long to confront: familial love and reckoning with pain.

Incidental Pollen is full of ripe metaphors that contribute to an overarching narrative of trauma. Bees (alluding to the title and titular poem) resurface again and again, each time emphasizing a different part of the extended metaphor. For example, the hive is reiterated in “Robber Bees:” “dead bodies were piled beside the hive—worse, they had stolen the honey. All that was sweet—gone” (58). Honey is stressed in “The Black Velvet Heels:” 

Austin-Li has picked a perfect metaphor to use as scaffolding for the collection. She draws upon its domain generously, referring to the queen bee, the honey, the hive, and destruction.

The poetic form is brave in this collection. “Rendezvous at Round Lake” is a pantoum, wherein the second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third of the next. This pattern is used strategically to call attention to the danger inherent in nature. The repetitions of lines like “I call my friend of gold” and “we are carved ancient as a glacier” emphasize memory and time, another dual-theme of the collection (36). Several palindrome poems are included as well, such as “Loss Palindrome” (45)  and “Portrait in Green” (5). A singular prose poem, “Reunion,” clarifies Austin-Li’s narrative on page 52, where the speaker longs for the deceased. This prose poem is greatly awaited, and gives readers concrete details, without any of the ambiguity that often comes with more abstract free verse poems. Austin-Li’s grappling with grief is sharp and poignant here. Additionally, “Undertakers” employs repeating rhyming refrains that allow the poem to transcend into a hypnotic calling rather than just a poem: “The bodies of the dead are carried… / laid away from the hive, unburied” (59). The rhyming of “carried” and “unburied” highlights death and refocuses the poem, undoubtedly, on grief.

Austin-Li allows herself to indulge in micro-themed poems as well. These were my favorites. In “Hidden,” she pulls from a lexicon of neurobiology to illustrate the potency of closeness:

She uses words like “limbic borders” and “synapses” to contort language towards the unfamiliar. The narrator speaks of an octopus in an aquarium here, seemingly a random component of the poem, but nevertheless, Austin-Li is able to weave this language into the rest of the collection.

This most heartbreaking and original element of this collection is its narrative. The speaker has lost not only her father but her sister’s son. In a series of poems, grief and memory become omnipotent themes as it relates to their deaths. “Mountain Song (for My Nephew),” for example, calls for memory to imprint itself on time: “The poem I must write to fix you on the page” (55). The loss of both Austin-Li’s nephew and father linger in nearly every poem within the second section of the collection. She grappled with memory’s uncertainty in preserving the dead. 

Although the collection is tethered to themes of memory, trauma, and grief most, other themes emerge as well. Austin-Li centers fertility in “If a Woman’s Eggs Had No Expiration Date.” She traverses the globe, from Ohio to Boston to Ireland, allowing for travel to emerge as a subtle motif. Lastly, Austin-Li engages with politics in “Smoke” by discussing America’s current political climate and alluding to systemic racism. There is truly a little bit of everything in this collection.

What Austin-Li does best is offer hope. She provides the notion that “There is no memory, only instinct,” allowing readers to console themselves with the knowledge that memory will be enough. The dead have no choice but to carry on within us (64). I was most struck by one of the penultimate poems, “To Recapture Faith,” in which Austin-Li concludes: “Radiance seems a relic of my imagination,  / show me again, owl, how to catch / the glimmer in the underbrush” (75). I found myself returning again and again to this line after finishing the collection, as that is exactly what Austin-Li does. Offers readers a way in reach to reach the glimmer in the underbrush.

Incidental Pollen is available from Madville Publishing

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Emma Goss is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.