& You Think It Ends poems by Amy Small-McKinney
Review by Rebecca Jane
& You Think It Ends opens wounds and exposes their lasting impact. Rape, gun violence, genocide, unsafe abortion, drug abuse, emotional abuse, bird extinction, and widowhood form the psychological landscape of these poems. For comfort, the poet offers a blanket, choices, time, and memory. When we least expect it, the aging body gets a voice. The wise woman reminds us, “we inherited sorrow / we also inherited strength” (35). With all this sorrow, how do we find the strength to heal and transcend? Amy Small-McKinney, Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus and author of Walking Toward Cranes and One Day I am a Field knows writing through grief, achieving merits, and teaching community poetry workshops.
In “Praise Poem: This Aging Body” she writes “My once broken heart– / a gull plunging toward a glorious unknown” (54). This collection takes flight and plunges into the collective unconscious as much as it is a personal psalm and victory song. Each word Small-McKinney chooses reveals the extraordinary care and wisdom it takes to create one’s own quiet glory. These poems bring the hope of justice to a world overrun with injustice. We find these poems, just in time “[t]hen notice…/ the miracle of you, who almost didn’t find me” (60). This is what these poems feel like—a hidden treasure and a friend the reader lean on and say, I am grateful I have found you.
These poems speak to how uncomfortable we feel in a world where we barely survive behind “a door locked against disaster” (50). She tries to protect her child at the same time she learns to accept profound loss. She disappears while also searching and wondering over family traits: what prevents her from, or keeps her, feeling at home in her skin, in this world? Remembering is a blessing, and “[t]his is my psalm: / an ancestor found her way” (30). The poet shows us how we must be resilient because “[y]ou must choose” (37).
Urgency arises here, like a heart beating, compelling us to understand “It’s time It’s time It’s time” (47). The rhythm of these poems penetrates and echoes, shaking the chamber deep inside the rib cage. Bring these poems to the doctor’s appointment to receive the prognosis. Bring this collection when going to see the astrologer, the teacher, the librarian, or the priest to give an added perspective. Much of the language invites the mind to be the breaker waves we “dive into, then somehow return” to the surface (54). This is where widows open their windows, the body is held dear, victims remember, and a dead loved one “becomes a stream curving toward its daughter” (26). The rich layers of meaning and the satisfying lyricism of these poems welcomes a reader to come and live in the words, again and again. Even though these poems are full of brutality and fear, still, the mother’s body can proffer a message of the “miracle of monsoon and ooze” (59).
A women can feel unsettled and cozy with this collection. All at once, the familiarity and strangeness of these phrases and images amplifies meaning. This book of poems is a companion to the poetic psyche, a friend to longing, and a dear loved one to growing wise with age.
& You Think It Ends
Amy Small-McKinney
Glass Lyre Press 80 page, paper $16
ISBN: 979-8991667395
Rebecca Jane is the author of She Bleeds Sestinas, which was a finalist for a Best Book Award in 2023. She works as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and poet who travels to Asia to study yoga, Sanskrit, and Mandarin. She lives with her daughters on unceded Kumeyaay land. (San Diego, California).