women & roosters
by Fenn Stewart
Book*hug Press
80 pages
$23
Fenn Stewart’s second collection of poetry, women & roosters, unfolds as a single long poem that circles around themes of climate change, loneliness, and our relationships with one another and the world itself. The opening line, “the earth’s on fire so I go camping,” immediately establishes a tension between the ecological devastation of the earth and the ongoing question of how we continue living our lives. This tension informs both the backdrop and tone of the collection.
From the outset, Stewart establishes that this is a book that does not shy away from grief and destruction. Her descriptions of animals and their deaths are visceral, as in “the deer’s skull’s full of young & unground teeth.” Throughout the narrative, the richness of the darker imagery—such as a donkey choking to death on a finger—creates a pull to the page that is impossible for the reader to look away from.
Stewart’s startling visual landscapes are balanced by a conversational tone that keeps the poems grounded. In one fast-paced scene, she writes: “an intolerable feeling . . . an elephant standing on my chest, you said. an elephant standing on your chest—you said your heart, you felt your heart, you felt your heart would explode.” The repetition here creates cascades that build up to the stanza’s final metaphorical explosion, mirroring the emotional intensity of the scene.
Stewart’s stream-of-consciousness lyricism is one of the book’s greatest strengths, creating turns of phrase that are both effortlessly fluid and carefully constructed. Every story told in women & roosters has a climatic build up, as in the scene where the speaker describes her brother walking “toward the sound of the sea”: “it was all wavy and indistinct where their feet met the sand, but he became clearer as they walked toward us. And so we found him, he found us, and he wasn’t lost at all.” In a book steeped in deep loneliness, this rare moment of reunion lands with heightened emotional impact.
“I’m writing to stop myself from writing you,” Stewart confesses early in the sequence. This push and pull between writing versus not-writing is one of the book’s most compelling through-lines, which is later expanded into interrogations of reading versus not-reading. “I should make a book of all the texts I wrote you in my head when I was running and then never sent you, and then I’ll make sure nobody ever reads that book.” Here once again, the reader feels the magnetic pull to the page, compelled to question their own proximity to the speaker of the poems.
