​The poems in Sharon Olds’ The Gold Cell chart out a life in four parts: the impersonal beginning, reflections of the speaker’s father, early sex and love, and finally the speaker as a mother. The collection’s language and imagery are particularly striking in ‘The Food-Thief’ in which the speaker writes, “His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a/woman might be open, as the earth itself was/split”. What’s intriguing about this line and many others in the first three parts of the collection is a drive toward writing about sex—when the poem itself is about a man who stole and is on his way to be drowned. And not only sex, but taboo sex because line above implies the man intends to kiss his brother as if he were a woman.
 
Sex finds itself in many portions of the collection, and most strangely in poems about the father. Maybe the father is seen as a figure so imposing and important, that sex (an inherently power-driven action) is the only way to talk about the father. For example, in ‘Looking at My Father’, the speaker says, “I know [my father’s] a tease,/obsessive, rigid, selfish, sentimental,/but I could look at my father all day”. Then the speaker goes on to describe the father’s head, nose, teeth all in an unsightly way, comparing, “the irises” to “the lip of a live volcano”. Conceding that, “I know he is not perfect but my/body thinks his body is perfect”, which is followed by much more descriptions of desire for the father. The speaker is battling with how her father appears in her life (whether positive or negative) because even though parts of him are unsightly, she still wants him in her life. Sex is then brought into the speaker’s teenage life as she describes her first sexual experiences (i.e. a handjob she gave a boy in ‘First Sex’) to the more sensual descriptions in ‘It’.
 
Because the collection follows the speaker’s growth chronologically, this love transforms from sexual desire to maternal desire in the fourth part. This is where we see the worries of her son and daughters’ injuries against the backdrop of their dead pets. In this way, the speaker’s fears are manifested, even confirmed, when they have to gas the daughter’s gerbils in ‘The Prayer’ or care for their son whom broke him arm in ‘The Green Shirt’. The speaker fears are at their highest when she imagines her daughter being raped in ‘The Quest’ like what happened in ‘The Girl’. Though, in the end the speaker may not have a solution beyond providing her children as much attention and love as possible.
 
The collection’s controversy arrives in the first part with the poem ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’. In this poem, the speaker describes “a tray/of penises” outside the operating room. The penises then are given voices somewhat comically. One way to read the poem is it’s a critique on how, as a society, we value manly violence when the first penis says, “I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more/killing.” In which the speaker is making a comment on how the man and thus the penis is the epicenter of violence. And in the removal of the penis, there is a removal of violence.
 
This is a very generous reading because the last penis in the poem is described as “unhappy”. In this instance, does this mean the penis was forcefully removed from the patient? Is Olds implying people are having sex reassignment surgeries not of their own will? If so, that is a hefty and baseless claim which derives from right-wing fear mongering. Some may say the collection is “Of Its Time”, as it were published in the late eighties, and the politics back then were much cruder. Even still, it wasn’t like trans people didn’t exist back then.
 
Regardless, torrin a. greathouse critiques Olds’ poem noting its transphobia in, ‘In an Operating Room Outside of the Cis Woman’s Imagination’. greathouse notes how Olds’ poem uses language of removal and absence. That Olds states something—a body part—was lost. greathouse retorts by saying, “After anesthesia, nothing is removed. Nothing wasted. Instead, skin/budded inward, a rose blooming into its own mouth.” greathouse notes that Olds has no authority on how trans bodies undergoing surgery should be described and interpreted. Even if the poem’s intent wasn’t to provide an opinion on trans bodies, the poem’s image was then a sloppy choice.
 
In fact, the poem’s inclusion in the collection is strange with how out of sync its structure and satirical voice reads after ‘The Girl’. And even still, what’s interesting about this poem is how it speaks to another portion of the collection. If read in isolation, the poem is frankly not all that strong. It relies on the situation of penis’s talking to keep the reader’s attention. Like, isn’t it funny that this penis wants to be painted in a still life—oh and look at this penis, it thinks it’s a dirty dog and needs to be put down. However, if contextualized against, say ‘Alcatraz’, maybe there was reason for Olds to include it. The first line of ‘Alcatraz’ reads, “When I was a girl, I knew I was a man”. Following this line, the speaker is haunted by the idea of being imprisoned due to stepping out of line with her parents’ teachings. With the line in mind, is it possible the speaker feels trapped in how she wants to express her gender? This feeling of conformity that the last penis in ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’ conveys when, “He lies there weeping in terrible grief,/crying out Father, Father!” And as such, is the sex in parts three and four ways for the speaker to defy her parents through liberation? That while she had no active participation in how her parents employed her gender, now as an adult she does and fully embraces it.
 
Or it is possible the poem’s shallow exterior is all it has. Situation and humor. Simply gilded. Transphobia in the age when being transphobic was simply the norm. However, a poem does not necessarily make or break a collection—like a clay brick building, one or two can be faulty and the whole thing can still stand upright. Which in the case of The Gold Cell, both ‘Looking at My Father’ and ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’ are faulty bricks. Bricks that show the builder was imperfect; bricks that crumble with time, revealing the outdated politics of forty years ago; bricks that—as greathouse has shown—must be reformed and refired and rebuilt.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is a novel in verse about a father and two sons dealing with the death of their mother. Quickly after the mother’s death from a fall, the family is visited by a magical crow, which acts as a physical manifestation of their grief. Sometimes it plays tricks on the boys or saves them from a demon, always looking after the family while the mother’s death looms large. Eventually, the father calls the boys out sick from school and they go to a beach to scatter the mother’s ashes.
 
Porter notes Feathers is a novel, though it is formatted closer to a poetry collection. Voices from the boys, the father, and the crow are woven through each other in verse-like stanzas. Though, the attention to line breaks doesn’t feel as attentive as some of the language which is piercing. For example, on one of the excerpts of the boys’ perspective, they question why there isn’t more commotion when their father reveals their mother is dead, “Where are the fire engines? Where is the/noise and clamour of an event like this?/Where are the strangers going out of their/way to help…”. In this way, what the boys are led to believe about death is false. It is not a cataclysm. It’s not an apocalypse. It’s a silence. Which is what this piece does so well: showing the emptiness, the holes of grief which fill with mythical creatures. Though I’m not particularly convinced it’s a novel through its formatting, which reads more like pseudo-poetry. However, all that being said, for its brevity it conveys the father’s grief well.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5​

​Copper Nickel Issue 40 is a collection of poetry, fiction, and essays. There were a few poems I particularly liked, such as, ‘Man Bowls a Perfect Game with Father’s Ashes Inside the Ball’ by Matt Donovan, and ‘Spring Snow’ by David Hopson. Though, the sand-out piece was ‘Ritual’ by Yang Hao, in which a man helps dispose of dead bodies in the near future. Though, the rest of the pieces didn’t feel as full as the ones mentioned above.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​Small Wars Manual by Chris Santiago is a collection of poems that upends the Small Wars Manual published by the USMC through erasure. These poems are about the history of America invading the Philippines, the lives of Black soldiers, and the speaker’s understanding of war as a child. There were quite a few poems that I liked, in particular, ‘1.2’, ‘Boondock Suite’, ‘6.4’, ‘3.3’, ‘Hitler Moves East’, ’11.1’, ‘Golden Age’, and ’14.1’. Though, ‘Hitler Moves East’ with its imagery of the brothers playing with toy soldiers and their return to their childhood home in search of their toys felt powerful in how it describes a fascination and then a disgust of war. I was fascinated with how this collection plays with and rewrites a history that America has tried to hide. And in a way, the form of erasure works to take back the voice of America’s victims.
 
Final Rating: 5/5  

​The Wickedest by Caleb Femi is a collection of poems which follows the happenings of a house party in south London in one night. I particularly liked the poems ‘Pass the Aux’, ‘Fredrick Stick Talks in Another Dimension’, ‘myth says South London boys don’t dance’, and ‘Brenda gives a pep talk to Abu’. The poems exude an energy of the house party, throwing away the idea of responsibility, and letting loose. Though, near the end, there’s a solemnness to the collection where Femi writes, “The stubborn weight of our giggling skulls/painted in your years./Remember us well.” A firecracker of a collection.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

Tin House Issue 60 is a collection of poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and interviews. Most notably, they interviewed Karl Ove Knausgaard on his six-book series autobiography. I also particularly enjoyed the fiction in this issue, ‘About My Aunt’ by Joan Silber, ‘When We Realize We Are Broke’ by Manuel Gonzales, ‘Before the Bombing’ by Jonathan Lee, and ‘Primal Scenes’ by Kenneth Calhoun. Though, I think the story that was the most haunting, dark, but needed was Adam Johnson’s ‘Dark Meadow’. I liked this issue, and found myself enraptured by the interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
 
Final Rating: 4/5
 

​The Iowa Review Winter 2023/24 is a collection of poetry, essays, and short stories. This issue had some really strong short stories that I particularly liked. The first was ‘Invisibilia’ by Tom Howard which features a family on the brink of divorce while all the family members either start to become invisible or shrink. I was also a big fan of ‘Family Video’ by Gracie Newman where two brothers take their grandmother’s old VHS tapes to a video rental store, fighting and remembering the love and abuse of their grandmother. There was ‘Human Resources’ by Brynne Jones which is about a woman working a corporate job when a strange girl appears at her door and as the story goes on, the girl becomes younger until she’s just an egg. And finally, I really enjoyed ‘Rifleman’ by Alex Burchfield about a Home Depot manager who befriends one of his workers, Andromeda/Andy, before a shoplifter comes into the store with a gun. For me, the stories in this issue really packed a punch, treading sometimes into the surreal.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Last Troubadour by David St. John is a collection of new and selected poems centered around the loss of friends and lovers with a strong tilt toward nature. I particularly enjoyed the poem ‘A Hard & Nobler Patience’ with the stanza, “& when her body was found she was so/Preserved by the icy currents/That even her eyelashes seemed to quiver/Beneath my breath”. Another poem I liked was ‘Stories’ in which the speaker recounts three stories that his lover had told him before she died. Overall, I liked the imagery and language of this collection.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​New Ohio Review Issue 34 is a collection of poetry, short stories, essays and reviews. I particularly enjoyed ‘visiting the Natural History Museum with my 97-Year-Old Dad’ by Michael Mark, ‘The Hair Cutting’ by Ockert Greeff, ‘In Our Nature’ by Sunni Brown Wilkinson, ‘My Body is a Cemetery’ by Eliza Sullivan, ‘Pantoum’ by Maria Martin, and ‘Kate Sessions Park’ by Bruce McKay. In ‘Kate Sessions Park’, McKay describes a girl, Fatima, who helps an intellectually disabled girl, Cici. When Fatima and the speaker bring Cici to a junior lifeguarding event, Cici pees herself, which causes Fatima to drive her to a beach 90 miles away, effectively getting her fired from helping Cici. It’s a raw story that works with the speaker’s sense of observations and intuitions.
 
Final Rating; 3.5/5

​A Cold Winter from Idaho by Lawrence Matsuda is a collection of poems detailing his family’s experience during World War II as Japanese Americans were forced to relocate to an internment camps. It follows Matsuda’s childhood in Minidoka as well as reflecting on the crimes America had committed on its citizens during the war. I enjoyed poems such as ‘1942 Nightmare’, ‘Too Young to Remember’, and ‘Arc de Triomphe, 2003 Invasion of Iraq’. Though, as a reader having a base understanding of Japanese American culture, I felt at points the language and images catered to a white audience. Many of the Japanese terms are italicized, which signals to the audience that those words are exotic or different. And in the poem ‘Go Game’, one stanza reads, “Thumps and slaps transform/gohan into mochi,/a gooey white blob,/for the New Year’s Day’s feast.” While technically fine, the poem assumes the reader doesn’t know what mochi is, taking precious space to explain. Another instance can be found in ‘The Noble Thing’ where a line says, “Gaman, ‘endure the unbearable with dignity.’” It’s not that these ideas shouldn’t be mentioned, but rather their desire to be defined within the poem accepts the conceit that the reader doesn’t know these things. And the people who are less likely to know are folks that aren’t Japanese American. Also, there’s a recurring image of samurai that parallels the soldiers of the 442nd, and while I understand this connection, I would’ve liked one with more dimension and a little more complexity. It was an interesting read, however I felt disconnected from the intended audience.
 
Final Rating: 3/5