Booklife Review

“Our hunger is never enough,” Bonner writes in a debut that unfurls and unravels women’s desire, laying it bare in all its messy, monumental glory. As the title suggests, Bonner’s crepuscular collection delves into an affair with a married man that ends in heartbreak, but lust is never presented as sin in these poems—“I won’t repair your marriage I almost ruined. [...] Before the paradise of feeling, // this brutal, risen heaven.” Rather, Bonner explores it, refreshingly, as an entrypoint to both a physical and spiritual ascension that gives the speaker access to “a wilderness my body can’t contain.”

After the speaker is transformed by this affair, she is left in a space of grief with a fractured identity, as portrayed in one of the collection’s most haunting, resonant poems, “In Kind.” “I became the other woman,” Bonner writes, but the other woman is not the enemy; she’s one among the community of divine femininity that shares “the violet flame of knowledge,” just as Eve dispersed with her consumption of the fruit. From her heartbreak, a new figure rises, born of the shared pain of sisterhood and a simultaneous loneliness: another woman.

Bonner’s collection progresses like a cycle with seasons passing, and each represents a different phase of metamorphosis in the wake of the doomed affair. Towards the collection’s conclusion, in the speaker’s final stage of growth, Bonner writes “alone I am witness to my wonder // full of luster at the fulcrum // of one space to the next.” Along with the rest of the collection, it suggests a wholeness of self attained by the process of continual becoming. In its strongest entries, Bonner’s debut is a feminist triumph that opens the pathways of consideration for how women transform over the course of their lives.

Takeaway: Potent poetry exploring women’s sexuality, loneliness, and selfhood.

Comparable Titles: Evie Shockley’s “her tin skin,” Jane Hirshfield’s “Desire”

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A