Cheryl Snell’s book: Prisoner’s Dilemma is a gorgeous, wrought book, complete with haunting artwork form her sister, Janet Snell. The book chronicles pain and dilemma, how to get through pain, what pain is. Her poems evoke mystery, reality, lyricism and in-your-face longing, hurt, tragedy an almost unstated questioning of how to get through it all. While reading this book I felt an uncanny connection to everyone: that surely, there must be others out there who have lived lives scripted mostly by loss and unspeakable hurt.
Cut

I start with the curls,
snip the dark with the silver,
somersaulting to the floor.

If I drop the scissors you’ll say
that one of us is unfaithful—
but I’m not superstitious, and I know
the quirks of scissors: twin arms
easily uncoupled; better together
though crossed as swords.


What is splendid about some of the poems is what could lie beneath the words. In the above poem the author never says why the hair is being cut – the poem focuses on superstition and a coupling of two people. Always, to my mind, the cutting of hair in writing and life, signifies something else – renewal, betrayal, anger, hope, envy, viciousness.

In the poem, Eating Beauty, there are meanings each reader would interpret differently, I suppose. My favorite line is:

Since there is no one here to forbid it,

As if beauty, itself, is forbidden, should be hidden, not “right” or moral. And this conjures all sorts of political and women’s issues. Aside from the sheer “beauty” of the line.

And the collection itself is beautiful. Make of that what you will.

--Nanette Rayman -Rivera