Crumb-sized was reviewed in Lines+Stars, a lovely D.C.- and Baltimore-based journal. They were one of the first journals to ever publish me, back in 2013 — so this feels like my poetry career has come full circle.
Rachel Mindell wrote a beautiful, thoughtful review of my book. Mindell, herself a poet and part of the Submittable marketing team, compares my poems to those of Heather Christle and Alice Oswald — high praise. “The poems in this book travel fearlessly and embrace widely,” she writes.
Poet Marlena Chertock’s second collection, Crumb-sized: poems, is a powerful invitation into spaces of this kind — those which forgo binary models, definitive measurement, and any understanding of life within the body as the sum total of life itself.
In the review, Mindell excerpts several of my favorite poems, ones that were difficult to write. She says that “her speakers refuse to relent,” which is everything I could hope a reader witnesses when reading my work.
These is formidable verse, full of grace and insight. It led me to question how I (mis)understand the “physical.” What is the body, a body, a celestial body? How do we measure it, against what, and to what purpose?
I don’t want to shy away from hard topics or tone things down. It’s so necessary to represent and describe my experiences with as much vivid accuracy as possible. Thank you, Mindell, for understanding that and for the really gorgeous review of my book.