Alison Prine’s latest poetry collection, Loss and Its Antonym (Headmistress Press, 2024), adeptly explores themes of grief, time, and sexuality with extreme precision through an autobiographical lens. Winner of the Sappho’s Prize of Poetry in 2024, this collection synthesizes Prine’s experiences of grief with those of coming into her sexuality in a way that lends space to the natural world, as well. Loss and Its Antonum provides a gateway into the past and navigates the complex webbing that surrounds grief and all its antonyms.  

The speaker’s own experience being gay dynamically provokes the conversation of grief towards one of healing. With multiple narratives occurring simulaneouly—the speaker’s relationship with her wife, the grief of her mother’s death and brother’s suicide, and the processing of her father’s mother’s death—readers glimpse Prine’s powerful journey through her sexuality alongside her grief. It is in these ways that the enigma of grief reaches a compelling climax in Prine’s latest poems.

Prine’s latest poems are unmistakably brave and bold. Her titles alone showcase a great deal of vulnerability and a commitment to storytelling: “Lesbian Child,” “Mother Who Never Grew Old,” “Bomb Drills of Childhood.” Prine’s life is wide-open for readers to peer in and learn from, the many ways grief can impact us on full display. Grief is also intimately connected to the speaker’s relationship with her sister in Prine’s newest collection. The carefully curated order of these poems traverse through girlhood to womanhood, offering a quiet celebration of sisterhood.  

Told in four subsections, Prine’s poems are each distinct in voice, though some converse with one another. For example, in the latter half of the collection, there are five poems each titled “Letter to Time.” These poems hold the crux of Prine’s study on grief, one that reveals time as a key component to healing and moving forward. Prine delicately plays with and pushes the boundaries of time in Loss and Its Antonym by utilizing complex metaphors on time. Some of the more striking of these metaphors, with time as the tenor, are “Time swings around like a shadow” from “To My Brother on the Anniversary of His Suicide” (33), “Can you see how time is tearing through me like a storm” from “Carry” (40), and “Time grows between us / with a mechanical agency” from “To My younger Self” (42). Prine’s verbiage is potent in these metaphors as she nearly personifies time, making it one of the most important features in the collection. Time continues to appear throughout the collection, a motif that reflects moments of the speaker’s past.

While there are many poems to celebrate among this gripping collection, such as “Strayed” (3), “Close” (39), “Yahrzeit” (42) and “The Good Summer” (58), one in particular stood out to me: a pantoum titled “Mabel.” The decision to use the pantoum format, one in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza are repeated as the first and third of the preceding stanza, allows this poem to transcend. Here, lines “her face stiff as a cupboard” and “her hands blue with stillness” are among the many repeating refrains (32). This poem illustrates the speaker’s father’s relationship with his mother and her death. Prine is not only concerned with her grief, but of her fathers’, making it a multigenerational matter. The repetitive nature of grief, and its boomerang tendencies, are characteristics of grief that Prine hones in on, making the use of a pantoum format wildly satisfying. Repetition emerges as one of the modes grief operates alongside. This purposeful form selection remains one of my favorite hidden nuggets in the collection.

Nature is yet another agent in Prine’s work that distinctly comments on grief in nuanced, less tangible ways. Nature is robustly described, as Prine gives us clues and emblems to hold on to as she discovers true grief. From rabbits, wasps, woodpeckers, and dogs, to a “carpet of flowers”, Prine’s impressive vocabulary of the natural world is an anchor in this collection, a point of grounding for readers to rest upon (20). The uniquely lyrical nature imagery in the collection allows grief to not only pass through the speaker, but rather, float, reflect and breath through us. Though lyrical and whimsical, Prine’s nature imagery isn’t just aesthetic, but works to create a melancholic, pensive mood: “the milky dark of the night sky hanging close” (37). 

The fourth sub–section of the collection guides readers into hope and the ways one can move forward when enduring grief. Reaching its zenith in the titular poem, grief is never more tender as it is in this poem:

By the end of the collection a deep sense of truth is established with the reader and the speaker, one that opens up a channel for the healing and processing that grief may require. One that mourns while still hopeful for the future.

Devoted to kinship, memory, and empowering one’s embodiment and sexuality, Loss and Its Antonym speaks on grief’s fluency in new and original ways. It will leave you speechless and wanting to share it with those you love who have gone through similar experiences. Containing vivid sensory experiences, indulging in the sounds we remember people by, the tastes that linger, and the smells that pair themselves with grief, Prine’s poetry glimmers in an otherwise melancholic literary space. You will leave this collection with a heavy heart and a compassionate soul, maybe one that will attempt navigating time without the ones we love just a little more easily.

Loss and Its Antonym is available from Headmistress Press

Emma Goss (she/her/hers) 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.

Jessica Manack’s Gastromythology (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024) is an astonishing debut that redefines hunger and girlhood. Each of this poetry collection’s three sections has a theme: being fed, resistance, and becoming nourishment. Throughout, Manack discusses many adversities women face in day-to-day life, like food, motherhood, and professional careers, in beautiful metaphors and intricate punctuation usage.

Gastromythology immediately drew me in with its world-building. “Archaeology” explores nostalgia and food, examining how the senses contribute to memories and how we recall our childhood. Reading “Archaeology” feels like getting a whiff of something sweet in the air, reminding me of a random day in my life ten years ago. There’s a secrecy in this poem, one that intrigues the reader and draws them into the story. I want to know the secrets being burned in this garbage fire Manack describes. This make me question the truth in memory—if no one else remembers, what is stopping one from creating a false memory? What we remember, the smells, tastes, feelings, are what create our memories, become the artifacts that create the stories we call ours. “Archaeology” is a skillful poem that joins the reader and speaker in an intimate setting, as if sitting by a campfire and sharing ghost stories. Perhaps, these ghost stories are stories of our past selves, and create who we currently are.

“Perilous Figures” is feminist in nature, exclaiming what girls are instead of what girls aren’t. The metaphors used throughout this poem are beautiful and at times, dangerous. One of these metaphors I adore reads:

This strikes me as powerful: the idea that a girl can be simultaneously destructive and nourishing is interesting, as there’s an incredible amount of stigma surrounding young girls being dramatic. Manack reconstructs what girls may see in themselves, not only in a reflection but in the construction of their future. If someone had told me as a young girl that I was a “smoking motor” (Manack 21), perhaps I would’ve been more eager to pursue my interests, an education, and things that aren’t “feminine.”

“Dad Visits Me at College” is incredibly ironic for me to read. On my 21^st birthday, my dad visited me at college with “pants [were] ripped / down the ass crack / with nothing underneath” (Manack 27). It was a case of unfortunate timing for my father to show up with a six-inch rip in the backside of his pants, not because he had been drinking like the figure in Manack’s poem. I  this poem to my dad for him to read, because I can’t believe another person had experienced a situation like this, one where you had to become your parents’ parent and try to find a solution for a problem they caused. His embarrassment both humanized him and made me see the boy inside the man that is my father. “Dad Visits Me at College,” I feel, is the perfect ending to the first section, showing the tip of the iceberg when a girl realizes age doesn’t always equal wisdom. Sometimes, seeing your parents “fucked up” (Manack 27) makes us see that the people we’ve idolized or held to a high standard are also fragile humans who make mistakes.

Section II is what I like to imagine as a rejection of feeding. This section seems to have larger “bites” of words in the sizing of stanzas, a shift from some of the previous poems that flowed with brevity. For example, “Saffron” is constructed in two stanzas, both thick and meaty. I adore the sensory imagery in this piece, imagining “the jiggles of custard” (Manack 38) or peanut butter sticking to the roof of my mouth. This poem, in turn, stuck with me. This section is the denial of nourishment, but the speaker seems to struggle with feeling fulfilled, despite eating five times a day. Seeing how the speaker eats often, but is never full because of someone else’s broth of a personality, makes me wonder: at what point do relationships and friendships become a form of self-harm, due to their lack of nutrients?

Manack’s ability to verbalize how aging impacts confidence is inspiring here; Section III speaks to me as a section showing how women themselves become nourishment for others. “Breastfeeding at Forty” feels like coming to terms with aging. The variety of punctuation in this poem makes it such a pleasure to read. In one particularly inspiring line Manack writes, “I try to see my wealth and not my dearth” (47). Beyond the uniqueness of the word “dearth,” the vocal rhyme doesn’t exist, but the eye rhyme here indicates some sort of synonymity. This skillful wordplay found in Section III ties the collection to a close.

Gastromythology is applicable and relatable in many different ways. The personability Manack shows throughout the collection is admirable, and this debut ties together many themes of womanhood into one beautiful binding.

Gastromythology is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions

Caroline Eliza is a poet and writer from Asheville, North Carolina, currently completing her degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College with minors in Pre-Law and Poetry. Her creative and academic work explores the intersection of poetry and movement, often blurring the lines between the written word and physical expression. Her work can be found in The Poetry Lighthouse and Sundress Reads by Sundress Publications. Beyond the page, Caroline finds joy in crocheting and dancing, grounding her artistic life in tactile practices and performance. She will graduate in December 2025 and plans to further her education, continuing to explore the connections between art, advocacy, and embodiment.

In Emilia Phillips’ Nonbinary Bird of Paradise (The University of Akron Press, 2024), God is many things: they are “a knot / that knows how to untie itself,” “the first/war,”  a “voyeur, who gave / [the speaker] dreams to cover the dark / valley of [their] loneliness / with wildflowering / mosquitoes” (19, 21, 6). Overflowing with references to their upbringing in the church, Phillips chronicles the manifestations of gods in their childhood, weaving their own queerness into retellings of stories from the Judeo-Christian and classical canon. Nonbinary Bird of Paradise is a reckoning with, and reclamation of, this volatile past–both their personal history, and a greater human mythology stained with misogyny, queer erasure, and a relentless centering of heterosexuality.

The collection begins with a Genesis-like series of poems titled “Queerness of Eve” divided into twelve ‘books’ (no accident, seeing as the Old Testament depicts the twelve sons of Jacob, the early patriarchs of the Bible). In “Book IV,” the speaker conjoins their own mythology with that of Eve, writing, “Woman always settled / on me like snow / on warm ground. Briefly” (Phillips 9).  Phillips’ Eve feels no closeness with God or Adam, but rather holds a litany of unanswered questions; they write,

Eve turns God’s own strategy against him to create a femme lover in “Book VI,” proclaiming, “God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / So I made a beloved / in mine” (Phillips 13).  The forbidden fruit for this Eve, then, is not fruit at all, but rather “peachflesh / muscled in [their] cage” (Phillips 18). After she and Adam are exiled from the Garden of Eden following God’s discovery of her creation, she divulges, “No one / can exile / me from / desire, not / even / desire” (Phillips 22). In moments like these, Eve carves out an identity for herself in the very spaces in which God and Adam seek to erase her, asking, “How do I make silence / my gender?” (Phillips 9). Throughout the loneliness and subjugation of the “Queerness of Eve,” Phillips skillfully imbues the speaker with quiet resilience; Eve repeatedly returns to her inner fortitude in the midst of punishment from male forces that attempt to control and subdue her. 

In the second part of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise, the reader is wrenched from this somber story of Eve’s exile and punishment for her defiance of God’s heteronormative hierarchies into the undeniable present; the two opening poems are about Wi-Fi and Google. The speaker still visits mythology, but from a distance; on a writer’s retreat, they sleep beneath a painting of the Rape of Io, a river god’s daughter who was raped by the Roman god Jupiter. This, again, interweaves with their own stories as they decide to leave their husband, telling the reader, “I called him to say / I was coming home / soon but not to / him” (Phillips 36).  Later in this section, after more contemporary poems that discuss french horns and butterfly houses, the speaker again inhabits a Biblical woman: the nameless wife of Noah, describing life before and after the flood (here, in a series of poems titled “Antediluvian,” “Diluvian,” “Covenant,” and “Postdiluvian”). Phillips again revisits the dismissal of female voices by Biblical giants; the speaker describes how she

By comparing Noah’s wife to the “captive stock” of the ship (ibid.), and likening the ark to a body being lowered into a grave (58), Phillips forces the reader to consider the manipulation of female lives in service of male whims and dreams.

In its third and final act, Nonbinary Bird of Paradise transports the reader from queer mourning into full-throated queer reclamation. Where there were motifs of profound, ancestral loss learned across generations (alongside dry, self-aware humor: in “Queerness of Eve,” the speaker admits, “You probably guessed / I created the female orgasm / all by my lonesome” (Phillips 3). In this Part Three, we encounter story after story of triumphant and playful defiance. Mythology and literature become a vehicle by which our speaker finds empowerment, a lineage of resistance. In “Emilia, Widow to Iago,” Shakespeare’s Othello serves as a method for our speaker to “dodge the dagger,” faking their death in order to escape cleaning up a man’s mess and avoid being his “rag and mop” (Phillips 74). In the next poem, the speaker again reminisces on a self they’ve shed in the voice of the naiad Daphne, who transformed into a tree to escape the sexual advances of Apollo. Resolute even in a new form, Daphne implores the reader: 

The speaker embraces humor and sensuality as they do their queerness in Part Three as well,  savoring the sonics of the words “lesbian elephants” as they fantasize about draping their trunk over their lover’s shoulders “like a boa constrictor” (Phillips 84). Alongside other delights of Part Three, including a laugh-out-loud poem satirizing gender reveals (“We’re having a cigarette after sex! We’re having it! Like once or twice a week!” [Phillips 69]), the collection’s titular love poem also comes in this section. Phillips writes, “Would you stay/& watch me, even/though I have no blue velvet/skirt or ruby-raw/throat?” (63). The speaker imagines how they would woo their beloved as a bird-of-paradise, without the gendered anatomy to perform standard mating rituals.

In Nonbinary Bird of Paradise, Emilia Phillips critiques, mourns, and reinvents classical stories by giving female queer heroines a voice within their pages. These heroines search for Gods everywhere, and often are left wanting. But by the end of this collection, the speaker has identified a potent God to whom they can speak – that which exists in those they love. In the irreverently gorgeous “Artemis Wears A Strap-On”, they proclaim their worship for their lover: “What is godlike in you,/ I’ll godden” (Phillips 79). I have found much to godden in the vividly transporting pages of Phillips’ fifth collection, Nonbinary Bird of Paradise.

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise is available from the University of Akron Press

Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.

In the 90’s, Robert Guzikowski had a bout of encephalitis that caused aphasia, which is the inability to form and/or comprehend written or spoken words, or sometimes both. This is the subject of unwordly (Uncollected Press, 2024). In fact, the vast majority of poems are titled “Aphasia Poem,” followed by a number. Most of them have a structure: four tercets, followed by a (usually) rhyming couplet. The imposition of structure intentionally underscore its arbitrariness, especially in the face of aphasia.

The first section of the book, “Shape o With Asemic Writing,” contains only one poem, “Aphasia Poem o,” which displays a writer who is sharply attuned to their own work. It begins “I can not speak this tale / ever changing yet it’s the only / story I have” (Guzikowski 2). He’s told the book’s personal history in three lines. But this poem also contains hints of what is to come in the following pages. Guzikowski describes himself as

His mastery of the English language (though I’m sure he would insist there is no such thing) is such that he can create words: I take “abcanny” to be a mixture of uncanny and abject. The two words the perfect description for the way you feel about your own body when it has betrayed you, become strange to you; the fusion of the two words hints at the larger theme in the book of the malleability of language, the strangeness of it that can only be grasped by someone who has been estranged from it.

Guzikowski renders his experiences with aphasia offers moments of poetic beauty and wisdom; he does not romanticize. They are, first and foremost, painful. “Aphasia Poem 25” conveys this better than any other, representing aphasia, the struggle to form language, not so much a struggle of the mind, but one of the body:

The lack of punctuation here adds tremendously to the rapid, almost frantic effect of the poem as he tries to make meaning again. And, as is typical of the collection, Guzikowski makes the most effective use possible of the words he chooses. The way the medications drone and pulsate as identity disintegrates create a scene that is truly nightmarish and disorienting. Here, the words “scatting” and “riffing” are divorced from their typically joyful, exploratory connotations (though he does make explicit reference to jazz giant Thelonious Monk later on) and instead become an act of desperation, a panicked attempt to make meaning—which, as the poem poignantly points out, is almost inextricable from a sense of identity.

The best moments of the book were those where Guzikowski draws connections between language, the body, nature, and the cosmos. In “Disabled Poem 4,” Guzikowski suggests that when human beings die they become a beam of light—not so much a transformation as a return to an original, ethereal form. He muses, with psychedelic wisdom: “the mimetic self / the full de-realized fully / depersonalized fully still a self” (Guzikowski 34). The standout poem of the collection, though, is “Aphasia Poem 13.” It is philosophical and paradoxical, concerned with creation and anti-theological, claiming

He seems at the beginning to refute John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” But then he reckons with the fact that language does the work of creation, in that it does not just generate, but “reveals space”, i.e., gives things boundaries, limits, and thus, form. Maybe it doesn’t do this in a literal sense, at least in terms of the world, but when it comes to the self, language is the only way to make the self known, even to, well, yourself. I don’t remember when I last read anything with such profound metaphysical implications.

Reading the book was satisfying in a way that I find to be paradoxically invigorating, much like good exercise. But unwordly isn’t all chaotic, anti-grammatical grappling with the Big Questions. Moments of simple and often transcendent beauty are placed throughout. “Aphasia Poem 35” offers the former kind: “shifting shape to fairy-size / buddha finds repose / among mosses and twigs” (Guzikowski 18). It’s the simple conveyance of a scene, coming as a moment of rest. In a book bursting with existential insights and interplanetary ponderings, it’s almost healing to have the poet simply enjoy the beauty of what’s before him. And in a way, the ability to do that, to be truly present, is transcendent. “Aphasia Poem 24 (Disabled Poem 1)” a consummate example of Guzikowski’s ability to bed words and grammar to his poetic will, is a critique of people like me, who “aren’t / able enough to theorize silence(ness) / not (only) as metaphor or structure but / as identity” (31). Through silence, Guzikowski posits, we can “find common / home aloneness one humanity” (31).

Indeed, humanity itself, it seems, is just one of the subjects of this book. Others include, as has been alluded to, the infinite, jazz music, animisim. Towards the end of unwordly there are dazzling love poems in which Guzikowski looks at his wife and thinks “light / illuminates and revealed every / face of your face” (58). There is so much in here I didn’t get to tell you about; unwordly is one of those rare gems of a book whose virtues cannot be communicated; it has to be experienced. 

unwordly is available from Uncollected Press, as well as through through Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Powell Books, or Amazon

Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge magazine, Emerson Green Mag, and won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.