Passing Through Humansville

by Karen Craigo

Sundress Publications, 2018

http://www.sundresspublications.com/

ISBN: 978-1-939675-78-1

77 pages

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Karen Craigo is the editor and general manager of The Marshfield Mail, a weekly newspaper in southwestern Missouri. She is author of the collection, No More Milk (Sundress Publications, 2016), and the chapbooks, Someone Could Build Something Here (Winged City, 2013), and Stone for an Eye (Kent State/Wick, 2004). Her poetry, fiction, essays and journalism are widely published, and she maintains a blog on writing, editing, and creativity, Better View of the Moon. She is the nonfiction editor and former editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review and the interviews editor of SmokeLong Quarterly.

I've never met Karen Craigo in person. We're friends on Facebook, and I have been a fan of her poetry ever since I read her chapbook, Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In, published by Hermeneutic Chaos in 2016, but now out of print. I reviewed her poetry collection, No More Milk on this blog in March 2018. —Karen L. George

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Review of Karen Craigo's Passing Through Humansville

Karen Craigo's Passing Through Humansville explores, celebrates, and at times mourns and resists what it means to be human through her particular lens of curiosity, honesty, playfulness, urgency, tenderness and reverence. These poems take us inside a home, a car, a school, a church, a hospital, a coffeeshop; in the woods, a butterfly house, a cow pasture, at a concert, an art museum, and within reimagined Biblical stories. She examines the duality and mysteries of being human—layering images and scenes of beauty, connection, nurture, creativity, and the holy pinned against vulnerability, worry, violence, loneliness and loss. The book is dense with emotion and understanding. I’m going to concentrate on the poem’s ideas and images surrounding the human need to connect—the give and take of nurturing and being nurtured.

The beginning poem, "Meditation With Cat and Toddler," sets up the recurring dynamics of the complexities these poems examine:

            And here I sit with a body reluctant

            to bend, a brain that won’t still, a cat

that bumps me for attention, and a toddler

            who will come, who has punched

me in the eye for pure love.

We see a mother trying to nurture herself by meditating, but her toddler and the cat both want attention. The image of the cat bumping the mother perfectly mirrors and heightens the image of the toddler punching her “for pure love.”

The second poem, “Before He Was Born, I Sang Night Songs,” is lush with images of connection and the sweet, primal, holy intimacy of breastfeeding. She describes it as “the latch, firm, parasitic, drawing the nectar / down.” The word “parasitic” effectively echoes the “bump” of the cat, and the “punch” of the toddler. In the first poem, the “constant rumble / of om” echoes the sounds this mother and her son make in their connection: “the soft constriction of throat” as the baby latches onto her breast, and how he “still vibrates with my humming.” In the center of the poem is the mother’s breathtaking admission: “There is nothing on this sphere I won’t pull to me, / won’t sing to in the dark.” She speaks of how she too is nourished by feeding her son: “the last moment I am everything, his sweetness / and his sound.” In a later poem, “The Art of Rhetoric,” the mother and son are described with this beautiful image: “this baby beside me, / curled against my back like the comma…” The poem ends with the following stunning lines:

            there is nothing more convincing than

            the whispered swallows I hear behind me

            as my son works his bottle in his sleep.

            Each nearly silent gulp makes a claim.

In “On His Brother’s Second Birthday” a second, older son is “inconsolable” because he “misses the baby,” his brother, who is now two years old. The mother reveals she too misses the baby, and comforts the older son, herself, and us by the reminder, “our younger selves / don’t go away—they live on, / deeper and deeper within us.” She goes on, in a kind of dual direct address, including the reader in this intimate, moving scene:

            …We must believe

            an infant resides in all of us.

            Come. Sniff the hollow of my neck—

            a scent so soft you’re not

            even certain it’s there.

In the playful “Spelling Test Friday” the mother nourishes her son by helping him to learn: “I spar with words / like a pugilist,” and she in turn is fed by the knowledge that “he gets it,” understands “he’s going to do fine.” In “Avocado” she talks about the ripeness and fertility of her body— “the nurturing flesh.” “Good Night in the Blanket Fort” shows a mother who promises to sleep in a type of nest her and her son built with pillows and quilts, “walls” to “protect us from blue night.”

There are repeated images of breath and breathing in this collection, which fit into this theme of nourishment. When we breath, oxygen is inhaled into the lungs, moved into our blood that carries it to sustain our bodies, and the carbon dioxide is expelled through exhaling. In the poem “Tasseomancy,” the mother and son connect through sharing coffee, and they thirst “to know / what the future holds,” ending with the image of her son staring into her coffee cup, “close enough / to smell the other’s breath.” In poem 5 of the series “Ten Sources of Light,” a baby under a jaundice lamp is addressed with the following tender lines:

            You, little loaf,

            are almost risen. How

            warm you’ll feel

against me. I can’t wait

            to breathe you in.

This collection also celebrates our human need to connect with friends and siblings. One poem recounts a childhood memory, a circle of girls in the woods, joining their drops of blood to become “Scab Sisters,”—“it was holy, we were dryads rejoining the wood.” In “Total Knee Replacement,” the poet refers to the body and the operation her sister has undergone, but in the following lines, she suggests vital aspects of love and our connection to others:

            We come to rely on the hinges—

            how they lift us and let us down, soft.

            Most love requires collapse.

            We fold and unfold into the other,

            or wrap the self in the self.

There is such essential wisdom in the above lines, and in the poem’s closing lines, that again express the healing of her sister’s knee, but at the same time speak of life in general in a reverent, unforgettable way:

            try to remember:

            this is how we rise, and how

            we leave, and how we pray.

The poet also explores the nourishment of love exchanged between spouses. In “When We Find a Hurt Mouse,” the husband “is kind enough / to bear the injured to the yard, / then with one stomp save it / from hours of suffering.” What a powerful image of violence as a means to deliver comfort. She goes on to say “not all gentleness / is conveyed in a caress,” and to describe watching him “stroke the patchwork squares / of the giraffe’s neck, receive / a blue tongue the length / of his arm, offer it a bit / of grain” – such a gentle, compassionate connection, which implies each (the man, the giraffe, and the wife observing) is enriched. In poem 7 of the series “Ten Sources of Light,” the husband is portrayed in such a loving manner as he gets the coffeemaker set up at night for his wife’s morning coffee:

            …each night

            unfolds a filter,

            measures grounds

            with a wooden spoon,

            adds water and comes

to bed.

The poem ends with the lovely image of how the next morning the “green dot” of the coffeepot “is just / enough light to help / me find my way.”

Imagery of light, as in the above example, is also threaded through these poems. Light as a metaphor for energy, connection, protection, and hope. In the collection’s center, the ten poems in the series “Ten Sources of Light” contain different examples of light: the glow of a town seen on a hill while driving at night; a reporter watching the eclipse and asking others what they think of the sun; seeing the aurora borealis; flicking on a cigarette lighter at a Pink Floyd concert; and with her father, viewing fireflies light up the night sky. There are also contrasting images of life’s dualism, its darkness, in the poems—instances of when we can’t connect with others, and when we can’t nourish ourselves or others as much as we’d like. 

Besides connection between humans, this collection contains poems in which the author reflects on how we connect with the natural world. In “Speleology” she refuses to kill the spider above her pillow, which she describes exquisitely as “eight eyelashes affixed / to a speck.” The poem “Filibuster” retells the memory of a male teacher that makes her stand each day during a civics class in the garbage can with her nose pressed to a chalk mark on the blackboard. The poem ends with a stunning, redemptive image:

            I start to get

            the sunflower, whose every

            instinct makes it stand

            with its tall quorum,

            who together turn

            their backs on the dark.

This collection also delves into connection and nourishment through spirituality. In “I Come to the Garden Alone,” she tells a friend she terms “a better Christian” that she doesn’t believe in heaven or hell, but instead feels “a river / of intelligence courses through all things, / and we join it when we are lucky // enough to die.” She describes this flow of connection in the following way:

            We are paddling through otherness,

            and the molecules that enter her mouth

            on a gasp came from somewhere,

            and maybe once were in me, in the barista—

           

            in cave people, street preachers, nuns.

In the poem “Mary of Bethany,” during a church service, a woman rubs the bald spot of the man she loves. The poem ends with the beautiful observation:

            And isn’t that God, touching us

            where we’re most exposed,

            loving even our emptiness,

            those places soft with down.

Besides the hopeful moments portrayed in these poems of connection and nourishment, there are also moments of unsatisfied hunger, emptiness, discomfort and disconnection. There is such heartbreak in “For Brenna <3 Ernie” when a mother recreates the moment her son hands a picture he drew of himself and a girl named Brenna to that girl:

           

            When he gave it, he broke

            into grief, racking sobs,

            eyes closed in shame.

            He loves her.

The poem reveals with such tenderness the details of the picture he drew:

            …Consider

            his vision, two, standing,

            so happy and plain

            in their britches. It is

            simple. There is nothing

            easier; the beauty

            hurts him, each one

            dignified and glad,

            small arms open

            to possibility

            in the twin flags

            of their rectangle pants.

The poem “Inventory” talks about not having enough money to pay the bills. The narrator asks the question, “What is the world’s crime / that it should be forced to pay / and pay again?” She continues:

            …I know the feeling.

            Credit cards, rent, car insurance.

            Just going to the mailbox

makes me numb. And then

            I look around, see a clearcut

            where my life ought to be.

The collection’s title poem, “Passing Through Humansville,” references an actual town in Missouri, in which the narrator of the poem “slips[s] into and out of …both coming and going.” Besides the literal journeying in a car through a town called Humansville, the poem suggests the journey of a human lifetime. The driver passes through fog, which she depicts as “the layer of white like an old lady’s hair / spread out behind her in rapture.” This creates such a whimsical picture, and to me, suggests the idea of the old woman being “raptured” to the hereafter. The poem continues: “Why not? / The oldest vessel can still hold / / a drink, or else we’d call it a shard.” This image of the woman’s body as a vessel infers she can still nourish and be nourished—that there’s still life in her. The ending stanza is so full of the duality of being human—living and dying:

            And maybe I’ve stepped on the ground

            where my ashes will light.

            Maybe, unknowing, I’ve danced.

The last two poems of the collection talk about the nourishment a teacher provides for her students, who appear to be learning English as a second language. In “Walking Papers” “students are learning / where to put the stress, what vowels / to flatten or round, how to hear / the difference in consonants…” It felt to me that this teacher is also speaking of language as a means to connect and nourish us, similar to song. The poem ends with the teacher’s compassion for her students, “those stonemasons and carvers, / painters and metalsmiths, / heading off into the unknown, everything they own heavy / against their shoulder.”

In the collection's last poem, titled "The Movement You Need," the teacher again delves into the components that make up the English language:

            The key, you know, is emphasis. English

            is a stress-toned language, and we listen

            for the punch, in a word, in a sentence,

            and that extra oomph, that little flex,

            is all we need to make sense of a thing.

And then she sings “Hey Jude” with the students who she says are “visitors here, / people who have been misunderstood / by cashiers and taxi drivers, / the lilting mismatch of Arabic, Polish, / Yoruba, Japanese.” The teacher begins singing “Hey Jude” and that has made all the difference—they are connected and nourished:

            …but today in class

            we layer vowel over vowel, and we sing,

            no hesitation, all voices present and clear

            from the first “Hey, Jude.”

The poem and the book end with such a note of unity and hope, incorporating some of the words of the Beatles’ song so beautifully into the poem’s flow of meaning:

            Don’t you know that it’s just you,

            hey Jude, you’ll do, and we do know,

            we feel it, we punch each key word

            to drive it home, into our heart,

            then we can start to make it better.    

The last line is, of course, a line in the Beatles’ song, but by not having it in italics, it feels as if the teacher is saying that the sentiment of this song is being “driven home,” into these students’ and the teacher’s hearts at one and the same time, to become a part of them, and that this connecting to other human beings through language, through song, can begin to make this a better world. I believe her.

Karen Craigo’s Passing Through Humansville is threaded with tenderness and reverence, vulnerability and honesty. These poems sing with intimacy, and a powerful voice of gratitude and hope about all the ways we connect in our experiences as human beings. The moments this poet creates, the ways she speaks to the reader, will nourish you at every turn.

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Here are links to some of Karen Craigo’s poems:

Escape Into Life

Connotation Press

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Karen George retired from computer programming to write full-time. She lives in Florence, Kentucky, enjoys photography and visiting forests, museums, cemeteries, historic towns, and bodies of water. She is author of five chapbooks, most recently the collaborative ekphrastic Frame and Mount the Sky  (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back  (2014) and A Map and One Year (2018). You can find her work in The Ekphrastic Review, Sliver of Stone, Heron Tree, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from Spalding University, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the journal, Waypoints.  

Review of Karen Craigo's "No More Milk"

No More Milk

by Karen Craigo

Sundress Publications, 2016

http://www.sundresspublications.com/

ISBN: 978-1-939675-39-2

80 pages

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 Karen Craigo is the author of No More Milk (Sundress, 2016), and she has two forthcoming collections, due out this summer: Passing Through Humansville (Sundress) and Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In (Tolsun Books). She maintains the blog Better View of the Moon, which deals with writing and creativity, and she is also a freelance writer and editor.

_________

I've never met Karen Craigo in person. We're friends on Facebook, and she wrote a blurb for my prose poetry chapbook The Fire Circle (Blue Lyra Press, 2016). I believe I originally heard of Karen at least ten years ago, if not fifteen, when she was an editor for a literary journal I was dying to be published in. I so enjoyed her chapbook Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In (Hermeneutic Chaos, 2016), and I immediately ordered her poetry collection No More Milk. After reading the first poem, "Down Will Come," and finding myself in tears, I knew it was a book I wanted to review. (Read my interview with Karen Craigo here.) —Karen L. George

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Review of Karen Craigo's No More Milk

The poems in Karen Craigo's No More Milk are meditations, praise songs and prayers about love and loss, connection and separation, scarcity and abundance, resilience and vulnerability. They take place in a garden, a field, the woods, a hotel, a church, at an ocean, at home, in bed, in a car, at a grocery, and a food bank. They pay attention to the sacred and the messy as they examine the mysteries of motherhood, beauty, memory, imagination, and spirituality that fuel and transform us as human beings.   

The beginning poem, "Down Will Come," references a traditional nursery rhyme lullaby a mother sings while rocking her baby. The poem opens with the mother, the "I" of the poem, admitting, "I'm really not much / of a singer." I was struck by the matter-of-fact tone and plain language, and by how the line break adds a haunting meaning to begin the collection with: "I'm really not much" which for me vibrates throughout the collection in its images, themes, and tensions of scarcity vs. abundance.

The next lines establish the collection's intense feeling of intimacy, of a mother beside you, speaking directly to you:  "Tonight / I rockabye the baby." The poet uses a striking image to describe this rocking:

            the way you'd rock

            a truck from a snowdrift,

            grinding gears over

            lowest notes...

  

It's such an unusual pairing of rocking a baby to sleep with song, which the narrator says she considers "holy," and the above image and its suggested "grinding" sounds. This intriguing comparison establishes a tension in the poem that threads throughout this collection.

The poem continues with the intriguing question:

                      ...Was there ever

            such music as your own

            mother's voice, filtered

            through the drumhead

            of her sternum, growl

            of song and blood

            and breath?

The above breathtaking lines contain such longing and tenderness. They invite the reader to consider their own memories of their mother's voice, and how they might have heard it when they were being carried in her womb—such a powerful image. The "growl / of song and blood / and breath" also presages other poems that sing of the body. And in the "growl / of song" there is again this unusual pairing that sets up a tension or rub that adds interest to the poem. It also echoes the earlier comparison of rocking a baby to rocking a truck from a snowdrift.

The poem ends speaking about memory and how it can transform with time, ending with an image inferring the vulnerability that memory opens us up to, and the vulnerabilities of babies, mothers—all humans alive:

                             ...And even

            if it wasn't beautiful then,

            it is now, in memory,

            her real voice a bough

            breaking crisp on the phone

            hundreds of miles

            from where you fall.

One of the things I admire most about No More Milk is the way the poems connect to each other.  The title of the first poem, "Down Will Come," speaks to the second poem "Milk" by invoking the image of a mother's milk coming down. In "Milk" the mother is "a thousand miles away" from her baby, and is having a difficult time hand-pumping milk. She says:

            My baby and I are near the end.

            It's no one's fault. Each day

            I have less to give.

Such simple words that speak so eloquently, layered with emotion and meaning—imply not just this particular narrator, her baby and a lack of milk, but how everyone in the world struggles with scarcity and regret. She opens the third stanza with "The world is dense with hunger" and the literal and figurative image of having to pull her baby's "fist from his mouth / just to feed him," and how "for some / hunger is a fist that never stops / being a fist." The fist suggests that hunger—the many desperate forms of lack and longing that exist in this world. The narrator also implies that sometimes all we can do is nurture ourselves:

            ...I couldn't dump that milk.

            For the baby in the courtyard,

            for my baby, for all

            the babies, I drank it down.

Milk is used as a symbol throughout these poems, as a source of sustenance, a gift a mother can give to her child—the first, elemental nourishment we give and receive as humans—the embodiment of love. In "Hours after Anger, He Wakes Me" a son spilling milk leads to anger, tears, a nightmare, regret, grace, and a prayer the poet describes as:

                             ...vague, no words,

            almost an odor of regret and shame.

            I stayed awake to write this poem

            and to draw a symbol on the fat

            wedge of my thumb—a secret mark

            that means Love the boy better,

            keep him, pin him to this Earth.

This poem speaks so intimately of love between a child and a mother and its inevitable failings and complications. In "Three Tips for Inhabiting Our Material World" the narrator also speaks of the sacred connection between a mother and son, by telling how he brings her feathers:

                       ...He smuggles

            these to me in secret,

            like the code

            to a lock, and I keep them

            in a vase—glorious

            tail feathers, pin feathers,

            scraps from a wing.

            He knows I love these

            artifacts of flight or battle,

            prismatic, pocket-bent

            or frayed.         

 It's significant that the poet describes the feathers as "scraps" which implies scarcity, and also as "artifacts of flight or battle," and not just "prismatic" but also "pocket-bent / or frayed." These words suggest the complexities and dualities of life that no doubt the mother and the son are continuing to learn and to teach each other. The poem ends with an intriguing and beautiful idea of the son "working on a notion / of place—about where / we might settle together, / and with what / we may line our nest." This image of a nest echoes so many of the other poems in the idea of hungering for nourishment (literal and figurative), and longing to find a home—your place in, and your connections to, a family, a community, and the world. The poem "Half-Buried" begins with the lines, "Eyes-down is how you see / the nests of things." In "Ars Poetica" the narrator says:

            I could feel all

            I was losing: I was

            a hollow tree, enough space

            beneath my sternum

            for a nest. There was no one

            to hold me but the world,

            the empty air.

There is such a sense of yearning in the above lines, of wanting to create and nourish, and to also find the sustenance to continue creating.

The ideas of lack and plentitude are also conveyed in poems about money. In "How We Save," parents teach their son about saving and thrift, give him "a dollar / for doing a household thing." But inside his piggy bank is also an IOU, "what it cost / to fill the car and take him / where he wanted to go." The poem ends with a visit to a park with a meadow where they lay in the grass, and the son "blessed / it with a name—Place of Fresh / Butterfly Milk."  I love that the mother in this poem teaches the child about finding abundance through being in nature, which mirrors the idea in the poem "Three Tips for Inhabiting Our Material World" of "working on a notion / of place" and creating a nest.

In "Special Money" the mother is forced to use saved Bicentennial quarters to buy a gallon of milk, giving the reader the powerful statement: "Nothing is so special it can't / be made bread." The poem "What it Means to Wait" contains a waitress whose purse is weighed down with coins that she counts out "for a jug / of milk." In "Offering," instead of money for the church collection, she offers stamps, "a gift card for ice cream," and "a poem." In "One Hundred Grand" she carries dollars "in this pouch I wear. / The thinking is that the law / of attraction will kick in, and soon / I'll be swarmed with greenbacks, ungainly as a mantis in flight."

Even though the title of the collection is No More Milk, and many of its poems examine scarcity, hunger, and need, they are also full of abundance and hope. "Naming What Is" imagines a scene such as the biblical Garden of Eden, where a man and a woman interact with the opulence of the natural world as they name things:

                                                   ...It was all

            so pure then—they were incorruptible,

            and language moved between them

            like a beast, sweet and lumbering.    

The idea of "naming" in this poem beautifully parallels the son's naming a meadow in "How We Save," and also celebrates language, the spoken word, finding a voice, and creativity—other kinds of abundance threaded through these poems.

Besides writing about connection and love between a mother and child, there are poems that feature love between partners. In "Scat with Mourning Dove" the "I" of the poem wakes to a dove's "syncopated song" and "a kiss, whisker sharp, a body / warm against mine." I love the way the poet pairs the feeling of a kiss (which I think of as soft) with "whisker sharp." This kind of duality, this acknowledgement of love's complexity, is reflected in the way the couple join in the bird's song, "yesterday's anger / reduced to syllables in the air."

In "Before We Try 'I Love You'" a couple is testing "the word obliquely. / On the phone, buffered by a dozen states..." The center of the poem contains such a striking image to convey the couple's conflicted feelings about making a deeper commitment:

                        ...But when we speak of each other,

            something catches the word at the trap door

            of our throats. It's like that egg

            the magician deposits in the cave of his ear,

            then draws whole from his mouth.

The egg is such a perfect image for the beginning of things, for nourishment, for everything elemental. In "Gathering Eggs" the narrator says "I'm here for their eggs, / a thing they give easily, / and I get it: some months / entire paychecks are taken / by snake-fingered hands." Such a powerful image of giving and taking—the exchanges we make in life. Eggs also connect to the nest imagery in several poems.

No More Milk contains a central long poem in parts, titled "Guided Meditation: Inventory" which is both an examination and a celebration of the body, what I think of as self-love. We move slowly from the ground up with poems subtitled "Feet," "Legs," "Hips," "Hand," "Arms," "Throat," "Head," and "Crown." The poems begin with a direct address to the reader (as "you") to "focus," "think," "consider," or "move your attention" to a specific part of "your" body. In "Feet" we see the poet's playfulness in the lines: "the feet—street urchins / who cleave to you." These lines are also beautifully rhythmic, with the repeated long "e" sound. She expresses such reverence and tenderness for the body, as in these lines in "Legs:"

           

                 ...Let the ankles,

            graceful as the neck

            of the Madonna,

            flop outward in repose.

In the poem "Hips" she says, "They are broad," and uses longer lines to enhance this characteristic, describing the hips with the following exquisite lines:

            They turn slowly like a beam from a lighthouse.

            Imagine you can open them to the light. You can't.

            Your pelvis is solid, the body's firm cradle.

Such surprise and beauty in the first two lines followed by the startling statement, "You can't," which emphasizes the reality of the body's limits. And yet, at the poem's end, it reveals the comforting affirmation that "You can fill you. You can invite / others in. Any time you feel closed or hollow, / remember, there is a secret door, a room." This sense of wonder at what our bodies can be and do, continues in the poem "Arms" by simply stating, "Picture them moving / along the gantry / of your shoulders. / They're snapping / a bedsheet. / They're pulling two corners / together." In "Crown" she says, "I think / hope lives there, or love— / things that have no place / near the body's rags and bruises, / its churlishness and fear."

Besides acknowledging the wonders of our bodies, these body inventory poems delve into the body's vulnerabilities. In "Feet" she states "True, / the world will give up / its carpet tacks, / its broken glass, / but promise the feet / you'll be vigilant." In "Throat" she delves into the body's complexities, describing the throat as "storehouse of the body's rage," and the stunning image of how from your throat "truth skitters like a mole rat." I'm reminded of the previously mentioned throat imagery in "Before We Try 'I Love You.'"

The vulnerability in these body poems is echoed and intensified in the poem "In Praise of the Body Broken in Two," where the narrator experiences three days of pain.  The poem ends with wonder, where she compares the body to a cathedral:

            ...the architecture of skin

            and bones—the arches and rose

            windows, buttresses, crockets, cusps.

            This place is so holy

            you'd have to leave your shoes

            to step inside.

The poet's handling of the body's vulnerability goes even deeper, darker in four haunting poems in which she imagines ways of dying—"by Bleeding," "by Bullet," "by Water," and "by Fire." "Death by Bleeding" opens with:

           

            You've thought of it, but no:

            the wrist is a narrow, helpless thing,

            and you have traced its rivers

            through the skin. All morning

            you've been flexing your hand,

            and you've seen in those cords

            a dear throat, clearing.

This image of the throat and its connection to our breathing, and our voice (especially relevant to a poet) was echoed in earlier described poems, effectively setting up a repeated pattern that resonates every time it appears. In "Death by Bullet," she says "Alive, we can only conceive / of the searing.../ It blooms there, sudden metal flower." "Death by Fire" opens with the chilling image "At the base of the flame / there's a blue answer."

Many poems speak of the natural world and its abundance and holiness—right whales she imagines crossing her path, trees creaking in a way that she describes as hearing them grow, a goldfinch returning to its mate "in the usual undulating way: / some wingbeats, small plunge, // and again, again, again." In "Taproot" she admires trees' resilience: "If something blocks their light / they'll grow around it...They point themselves / directly at their need."

The collection's last poem, titled "Fruits," opens with the lines:

I want to say something

about the wild strawberries—

how they were all along the patch

and seemed new.

She goes on to describe their beauty:  "so bright, unusually small. / We weren't sure what we were seeing— / even after I kneeled to touch one / and noted the surface studded / with seeds." Then the poem turns, as the narrator reveals she's thinking about these strawberries while she's rocking her baby, who's been crying for two hours— "a tooth is trying to bloom / in his inconsolable mouth." This baby, the mother rocking to console him, and his "inconsolable" need mirrors the beginning poems so perfectly—and these repeated ideas of abundance and scarcity, and of longing for beauty. The poem and the collection end with the surprising, exquisite lines:

            ...the baby flexes his back

            and lifts his mouth closer

            to my ear. The baby says beauty

            is ephemeral, and the earth

            rewards us when we pause

            before its fruits. Go ahead and write,

            he says—tell the people

            what you know. It's entirely possible

            those berries are already gone.

Yes, the poems in No More Milk tell us what Karen Craigo knows of scarcity and abundance, giving and receiving, yearning and loving, vulnerability and strength, beauty and holiness. These poems celebrate and rant about the dualities and mysteries of being human. They resonate with genuine and complex emotional intensity, and an irresistible tone of playfulness, kindness, intimacy, and reverence. These poems will surprise, ground, and nourish you at every turn. 

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Karen George retired from computer programming to write full-time. She lives in Florence, Kentucky, and enjoys photography and traveling to historic river towns, mountains, and Europe. She is author of the poetry collection Swim Your Way Back (Dos Madres Press, 2014) , A Map and One Year, forthcoming from Dos Madres Press, and five chapbooks, most recently The Fire Circle  (Blue Lyra Press, 2016) and the collaborative  Frame and Mount the Sky  (Finishing Line Press, 2017). You can find her work in The Ekphrastic Review, Sliver of Stone, Heron Tree, and America. She holds an MFA from Spalding University, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the journal, Waypoints. Visit her website: http://karenlgeorge.snack.ws/.