It's What I've Got Left

Bol

It's What I Have Left cuts through inheritance, womanhood, and survival with an attentiveness towhat endures-and bites: memory lodged in the body, belief revised but not erased, love thatrefuses to loosen its grip. In poems that braid lyric intensity with narrative pressure, these pagestrace how harm and devotion spool forward and back across generations, testing what love willand will not allow. Prose poems such as "Dear Third Born Child, I Promise I'm Trying, Love,Mom" and the searing "Notes for My Daughter As She Prepares for Her Most Public SexualAssault" unfold through instruction, footnote, and reckoning, holding rage and tenderness in thesame breath. Elsewhere, moments of hard-won clarity flare unexpectedly: "let the water makethe world a conch," a line that listens for vastness without judgment. Allen writes poems thatstay-echoing, spiraled, alive to what cannot be unlearned.Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest

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Pagina's: 88, Paperback, Lily Poetry Review