dear girl: a reckoning by drea brown. Gold Line Press, 2014. 47 pages. $10.00, print.

drea brown’s dear girl: a reckoning is the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition and a hauntingly beautiful glimpse into the Middle Passage and the life of Phillis Wheatley. brown’s poetry attempts to envision not only Phillis Wheatley as the poet, but also Phillis as the girl aboard a slave ship struggling to understand not only her situation, but also her new identity as someone’s property.

Each of brown’s poems deals with a specific moment in the harrowing journey across the ocean and the themes of haunting, rememory, and giving voice to the dead. This theme of rememory, a term which brown borrows from Toni Morrison, is one that occurs in each poem and calls into question how memory itself influences not only an individual, but also perhaps, an entire group of people. brown tells Wheatley’s story not only to show how portions of the poet’s identity were erased or unacknowledged, but also to address how the girl in her poems could embody not only Wheatley, but also countless unnamed girls.

brown asks readers to reimagine, remember and employ rememory to give voice to the dead and through doing so, exorcise some of our own haunted, unacknowledged pasts and shared histories. The chapbook opens with a poem emphasizing the voices of the dead, but end’s with a similar request successfully closing the narrative. brown’s rich imagery, variety of poetic forms and narrative tells readers that the dead will have their stories told: “the dead will have their due. they will speak from graves or whisper into the ears of poets or search oceans, to begin here or rupture or capture loss” (45).

-Chelsea Graham, MAR

Waiting for the Enemy by Brandon Davis Jennings. Kindle Edition, 2014. 44 pages. $2.99, electronic.

Brandon Davis Jennings’ Waiting for the Enemy is composed of five distinct, yet connected, stories examining the life of men linked to the United States’ armed forces. This collection is aptly titled because these stories explore the moments and experiences of war when there is no clear enemy present; however, just because there are no depictions of the traditional battlefield does not mean that this collection lacks urgency. We see the characters deal with trauma, loss, horror, and detachment.

The title story, “Waiting for the Enemy,” best encapsulates all that Jennings is able to accomplish. In this piece, the narrator and his comrade, Rake, are stationed to keep watch in a control tower, and while they are there a camel falls into the barbed wire that surrounds their location. The characters’ respective personalities are revealed and explored in the ways that they react to the trapped and tormented animal. In fact, it is this injured animal that most haunts the narrator years after he returns from war.

Jennings has crafted five pieces that can stand well on their own, but when viewed together create a cohesive view of war’s effects. While all of the connections may not be clear the first time through, this fact allows readers to uncover new discovers with successive reads—each one as rewarding as the first!

-Dani Howell, MAR