Review by Melanie McGehee
Though In the Needle, A Woman is Susan Michele Coronel’s debut poetry book, ‘debut’ feels misleading. Many of the sixty-three poems here were previously published individually, in a wide variety of literary magazines. It may be more fitting to define the collection as prize-winning, as this 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Prize winner reflects maturity and refined poetic craft. I set out to enjoy them all in this new way, presented as a whole in four distinct groupings. I experienced them as one might experience a new and growing relationship.
Reading Coronel’s poems is like taking a walk with a friend. At first, conversations skim the surface, but as you walk together again and again, you begin to hear a lifetime of stories. They don’t unfold chronologically, yet you piece them together over time. This is what happens in Coronel’s collection. While certainly not chronological, the poems build with hints and foreshadowings, revealing in each a new secret, be it grief or intimate longing. This book became, whether the poet meant it in this way or not, a memoir in verse to me.
To Whom Do I Belong? greets the reader with an expansive list of declarations, introducing the poet of these pages. With skillful use of repetition, Coronel employs affirmative answers to the titled question. Again and again, each sentence begins with I belong to… and adds layer upon layer. She dares to begin this collection with a roach and somehow does not disgust me.
I belong to the roach, its slippery wet mouth
scuttling under sheets, sun-split sky & salamander sand.
Yet, while grounded in the earth, its creatures, and bodily sensations, this same poem hints at ancestry, tradition, and faith.
I belong to the Star of David & to the dust
we all become.
Finding a spirituality true to herself is a continued theme throughout the collection, but we learn in this first offering that Coronel does not confine herself. She leans strongly into imagination, her images a constant juxtaposition of surprises. This poem that begins with a roach takes many turns, ends with an ethereal echo.
I belong
to the river of strong bones & peppermint rain.
In later poems, Coronel will prove adept at welcoming us into worlds of mermaids, selkies, dybbuks, and Greek goddesses.
Coronel plays, too, with form. You’ll find a poem in couplets followed by a prose poem. You’ll read an ode to a grandparent and later a letter to God. These are observations, questions, and wisdom gained over five decades of life. Four times an age is mentioned in the title of a poem. There is the daughter at age ten and again at age thirteen; there is the woman at thirty-five and again at fifty. Relationships are the crux of it all. We experience Coronel as a daughter, a granddaughter, a wife, and a mother. The meshing of these poems with each other replicates how meshing roles play into a wrestling identity.
I have read and reread this book. In my last reading, I noticed mentions of the thread in multiple poems and I found myself returning to the title poem.
In the heart there’s a needle, in the needle a woman,
in the woman a snowstorm & in the snowstorm
a hairbrush knotted with thread.
In untangling these threads, Susan Michele Coronel offers not just poems, but sacred storytelling.
In the Needle, A Woman by Susan Michele Coronel
Finishing Line Press, 2025, $22.99 [paper]
ISBN Number 9798899901140
Melanie McGehee is an essayist, poet, and storyteller. She earned her MFA from Wilkes University after turning fifty. Her work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Fall Lines, Peregrine Journal’s Caregiving Folio, and Hippocampus. She is currently working on WRITE HOME: Letters to a younger self, an anthology with The Athenaeum Press