BookView Review

Steele’s debut poetry collection moves with quiet assurance through landscapes of loss, memory, and hard-won resilience. The poems range fluidly between spare lyric fragments and longer narrative reflections, held together by a clear, consistent voice and an instinctive trust in sensory detail. The book’s imagery is tactile and alert to the outer world. Nature appears not as ornament but as emotional language, translating inner states into physical moments, as in “Heron’s Catch,” where the bird stands “silhouetted by the twilight,” waiting in stillness at the water’s edge.

Familial loss forms the book’s emotional center, often conveyed through quiet domestic scenes where absence is keenly felt. In “A Lesson in Grief,” Steele recalls the moment she first encountered loss, marked by the image of her grandfather’s empty armchair: “That was until the day I hurried through the doorway and saw an empty chair.” Many of the poems rely on compression, offering brief impressions that recall haiku and imagist traditions. This economy frequently sharpens their impact, as in “Not Broken,” where defiance is distilled into the stark assertion, “my words are blades / they slice through flesh.” When Steele allows herself greater space, the work deepens, particularly in poems of love and separation, such as “Yesterday,” which closes on the quiet devastation of distance: “now / our souls are adrift.”

A lush, thought-provoking body of work attentive to both inner life and the physical world.

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