cover image My Darling from the Lions: Poems

My Darling from the Lions: Poems

Rachel Long. Tin House, $16.95 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-1-951142-71-1

Divided into three titled sections, “Open,” “A Lineage of Wigs” and “Dolls,” the striking debut from Long interrogates girlhood, adulthood, and gender politics. These pages are rich with memorable phrasings (“wedding rings glinting/ like mouths not used to smiling”) and skillful uses of musicality that lend these poems, full of appealing anecdotes themselves, a rhythm: “I was a choir-girl. Real angel—/ lightning-faced and giant for my age.// Mum let us stay up late/ if we went with her to night vigil.// It started at midnight, a time too exciting to fathom./ How the minute and the hour stood to attention!” A series of short, repeated poems called “Open” provide an unusual and delightful refrain to the collection, the minimal alterations between each making them continually new. Long’s self-reflective, playful language is often philosophically deep, balancing two modes and tones: “Last night, I missed my train by seconds./ So close that one part of me did catch it/ and waved from the window to the other half/ still panting on the platform” (“Apples”). These gripping, vivid poems announce Long as a notable new voice.