Each Tree Could Hold a Noose or a House

by Nina Puro

Preoccupied by haunting, poisoned places and bodies, Puro explores the intersections of personal history and social forces, integrating representations of femininity and the body, creating an undercommons, a multiplicity, a "we."

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer

127 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2018

Reviews

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the poems in this book very rich. By the end, I felt like Puro had taken with me on a long journey, internal and external, and was saying good-bye in the excellent final poem of the book.

The poems express a lot of pain about the past and about life's choices, along with important ambivalence ("Our country's beautiful and wants us dead in the most casual way"). I also sensed a caring for home, perhaps even nostalgia. A lot of poems are addressed to an unidentified lover with a tragic end. The style is consistent but wielded across a great variety of layouts, from abruptly short lines to sprawling paragraphs loaded with fractured narratives.

Puro's suggestive language can lighten the poems' gravity (for instance, "before the storm got big enough to be named a girl's name"), although just a few times I felt she was trying too hard and falling into mere cleverness.