Close Menu
  • Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER ONLINE
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Craft
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
      • Bookshelf
    • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Poem of the Month
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
MER – Mom Egg Review
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube Tumblr Threads
  • Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER ONLINE
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Craft
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
      • Bookshelf
    • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Poem of the Month
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
NEWSLETTER
MER – Mom Egg Review
You are at:Home » Forgiveness by Chelsea Bunn

Forgiveness by Chelsea Bunn

0
By Mom Egg Review on January 22, 2020 Book Reviews

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

 

What is it about the pressures of forgiveness that plagues and propels us? We live our lives in pursuit of knowledge, happiness, and love, and despite any accolades and earnest gestures toward fortifying our own humanity we manage to be detoured by the regret of our lesser moments and the challenges of our mortality. Chelsea Bunn hits several sensitive and familiar nerves with this eighteen poem collection that reveals and revisits the hope and grief that is threaded through rite-of-passage episodes. These involve missed opportunities, loss, violations (natural and self-inflicted) of the body and morale, and the hazards of creating distances of our own volition.

Both physical and emotional distances are topographies that often magnify and sustain the grief of guilt, and anxiety of uncertainty, expressed in simple yet eloquent language as in “Desert Impasse” (p. 29):

Blonde grasses
dry clean and brittle
in January’s winds.

Two thousand miles away
my father died.

What I’d hoped
may not be true:

that here, all grief
collapses like a star,
its matter ejected into space.

That here, all sins
are turned to dust.

The fear of personal failure haunts like the echo of coyote voices in “The Beau Geste Effect,” (p. 6) an auditory illusion that multiplies into a Greek chorus on the periphery of the landscape. Printed in a tight, justified two-stanza column (as it appears in the book), the poet admits that these imagined “scattered voices” surround her, and that she fears

…they want to
drag me through the dark
paths behind the houses
they circle.

Why did you leave your
life, they howl. Idiot. You
won’t find a job, or
friends, and we watch the
smoke pour from your
chimney every night,
laughing at your
weakness…

Another poem which uses a visual strategy in its unraveling of disturbing recollections is “Litany,” (p. 2) which makes it way to the exultation of survival as it moves from “Survived the father’s   hand across/ the kitchen table   that sudden sting/ hand of passing  man/Canal Street/ snaking up my skirt/ open hand of young   boy/crowded/ corner/Mexico  twenty-three/older/man dragging leathered  hands across/ my lifeless form…” and to:

                                                         …and praise
the door that delivered me                          into
that night                             and praise the body
its resilience                         and praise the body
its resolve                            and praise the body
its tender grief …

In addition to capturing heightened moments with this type of dramatic musicality (and fragmented vignettes), Bunn articulates confessions and personal crises that arise in the private realm of therapy sessions that recall the urgent narratives and raw energy of Anne Sexton (particularly “Music Swims Back to Me”) and Sharon Olds (poems in The Father). We have “Forgiveness,” (p.18) the one-on-one therapy scenario where her counselor wants “to get me to forgive/myself. She wants to free me/ of the song// I play over and over in my mind, which governs/ every part of me: nerves// veins, fingers, ego.” In “The Meeting,” the poet uses the phrase “but let me back up again” as a refrain to keep track of the issues and reasons that brought her to a therapy group to deal with her demons and the stages of her self-destruction. The process is a painful one, honestly hewn and vividly portrayed:

…and so I tried to tell the room
full of strangers what happened
but my voice kept cracking and
I felt my legs trembling in the metal chair
and I kept smashing my hands together
and then three women
surrounded me to stuff tissues in my palm
and give me their advice…

Chelsea Bunn’s journey toward healing and redemption is bravely and eloquently rendered. The poems in Forgiveness remind us that the very attributes that make us human— our vulnerability, our ability to suffer, our desire to love and be loved—give us the drive and determination to heal.

Forgiveness
Poems by Chelsea Bunn
Finishing Line Press, 2019


Mindy Kronenberg is an award-winning poet and writer with numerous publication credits world-wide. She teaches writing, literature, and arts subjects at SUNY Empire State College, publishes Book/Mark Quarterly Review, is editor of Oberon poetry magazine, and the author of Dismantling the Playground (Birnham Wood), Images of America: Miller Place (Arcadia), and OPEN, an illustrated poetry book (Clare Songbirds Publishers).

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Previous ArticleCourtney Kessel – Art
Next Article M.A.M.A. Issue 40 – Anna Perach, Art, and Jane Yolen, Poetry

Comments are closed.

May 8, 2025

Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree by Jennifer Martelli

May 8, 2025

Venus Anadyomene by Alyssa Sinclair

May 4, 2025

Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (non) Buddhist Memoir by Linda Trinh

May 4, 2025

Apartness by Judy Kronenfeld

May 4, 2025

Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez

May 4, 2025

All This Can Be True by Jen Michalski

May 4, 2025

Leafskin by Miranda Schmidt

May 1, 2025

MER Poem of the Month – May 2025

April 27, 2025

MER Submissions Are Open!

April 20, 2025

MER Reading a Mass Poetry in Salem MA

Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube Tumblr Threads
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Submit
  • Contact
MER - Mom Egg Review
PO Box 9037, Bardonia, NY 10954
Contact [email protected]

Copyright © 2025 MER and Mom Egg Review

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.