Something Dark to Shine In

In Something Dark to Shine In, trauma manifests in body horror. Skin strips away from flesh; blood stains floorboards; and teeth fall out to become toys. Death and religion hover constantly in the background of this haunting and haunted collection, even as the speaker reminds herself, "I am not dead yet." Faced with the alienation and the horror of sexual violence, these poems resist the impulse to romanticize. Here, rot is marked by "a black wool of flies," soil is laced with "chips of plates or lead paint," and feral wolf-women refuse to be tamed. The classically beautiful becomes frightening such that a bee's sweet honey is a reminder of the pain of their sting, and a golden crucifix is a symbol only of a calvary's violence. Something Dark to Shine In refuses to look away from pain, from violence, yet to read these poems in a world where such atrocities become banal and commonplace, is to witness a profound refusal to die, a wish to find beauty, and even hope, in one's own terror.