The Smallest of Bones by Holly Lyn Walrath

Clash Books, 2021

ISBN-13: 978-1944866952

Available: Paperback ( Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

“If you strip me down to my bones / am I yours?” the speaker asks, in Holly Ryn Walrath’s poetry collection The Smallest of Bones. Groups of poems divided into sections called Cranium, Mandible, Sternum, Sacrum, Spine, Calcaneus, and Temporal provide a larger osteo-literary structure into which the poems slip like so many small bones surrounding the artistic organs of thought and emotion.

Sometimes surprising, often disturbing and provocative, these poems are the life-blood emerging from the marrow of meaning. There are vivid images of “ocean eyes” and “demon’s tongue,” a couple symbolized as “the tree burning after” and “condemned women” as metaphorical “rare birds” who should be studied. One speaker asks, “hold me under your tongue / like unspoken regret,”  another confesses, “I carry my face in my pocket.”

There are many memorable lines to savor throughout the collection. Some of these rhyme: “the smallest of bones / is a part of the hammer in your ear / love is a heartbreak you can hear.” Some are startling: “ask me, where is your wild woman? I shot her in the face” and “wouldn’t you rather be something violent if you had the choice?”

Walrath also considers love, but it is not in the usual terms. In the moment of connection, “his hands tensile slipping under my radar my heart was sonar,” the speaker remembers, and “to love so much your body changes / curving together like two halves of the taijitu or the earth and the moon / must be dreadful and excruciating,” reflects another.

Walrath also comments on many other topics like sex and gender, physical attraction, memories, science, ghosts, birds, parasites, the nature of women, death, dreams, pain, bodies, flowers and writing. Even the Table of Contents, composed of the section headings and first lines of the poems, can be read as a poem. Try it!

“I wrap bone chains around your head,” Walrath writes. Yes, she does, and I recommend it.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley