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Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Burial Day Books, 2020

ISBN: 9781735693613

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition

Through a collection of terrifying portraits, Cynthia Pelayo creates a true crime portfolio in her provocative book of poems Into the Forest and All the Way Through. Each poem memorializes a particular child or woman who was murdered or simply vanished never to be seen again. Some of the poems describe the victim and some the scene of the murder. Others give us a snapshot of tragic moments in time or suggest the final minutes of agony and fear that these people suffered.

Pelayo’s choice of genre lends itself well to revealing the random clues left behind pointing to abduction, the details of clothing collected from people trying hard to remember something that might prove useful to an investigation, and the cataloguing of the victim’s habits, interests, and favorite places. All of these fragments paint a picture in the reader’s mind of the terror of those whose lives have been taken and of those left behind to deal with either the finality of death or the suffering of never knowing what really happened or why. There are also some poems in the collection that depict the murderers: their brutality, lack of human emotion, and even glee in frustrating the efforts of loved ones wanting to find a body to bury.

The most bone-chilling poems are those that describe the things that scare us the most – what we can’t see and what we can’t stop. There is the woman “found stuffed in a chimney” where different people had lived for years without knowing she was there or the man who worked at a home for the disabled and took the life of “a sweet young woman” “like a child, innocent.” The abducted “island girls” whose pictures have been discovered in the ground are “singing their mourning songs” “pleading come find / Me.” The poems in this book forcibly call us to be aware of the thousands of “forgotten and ignored women,” the dangers that still exist, and the problems that have gone unsolved, just as their murders and disappearances have to this day. Recommended.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley