We Were More Than Kindling by Jessica Morey-Collins

Black Lawrence Press, October 2023, $9.95

Jessica Morey-Collins eloquently mixes multiple worlds, multiple moments, all intertwined in her latest chapbook. You dodge one way to escape the open wounds of rage and sorrow and land in a pillowed field of splendor within the pages of We Were More Than Kindling. Morey-Collins does not shy away from describing trauma and abuse, nor the troubled fate of our planet in her eco-friendly poems with rot and an uplifting dose of beauty. 

“Does the gulf’s growing dead zone still / taste like ocean?” “They must understand the magnetism / of her laugh, how it sweetens the air of a planet we’re com- / plicit in trashing.” Unmistakably, her professional land planning background brings riches to her descriptions.

You never know what will pop up and make your blood pump at a different rate when you start the first line of a poem, but when the title is “Who Cares About Consent” for those who have been assaulted, the odds are it is a poem best read with a calming cup of tea. Keep that cup of calm handy for “Descriptions of Human Women” too, as the collection builds and burrows into the lingering trauma of rape. Anger and anguish are wrapped in beautiful scenes like “Fog-clung / lodgepoles ache at their roots.”

Morey-Collins stamps her perspective on that ever-present family trauma mixed in with a camping trip, we find this: “In her first trimester, she did not know me. Until she / tested pregnant, I did not exist. It isn’t fair to ask if she was / still using, then.” 

The structure of Morey-Collins’ poems flow between prose and short lines, and several poems have a small gem of a few lines in a final stanza, with phrases that stick. Hunting for those phrases alone is worth picking up this new work published by Black Lawrence Press.

Her poignant introspection does not stop with the last poem. While many poets have been including Native lands acknowledgments, Morey-Collins calls out from a noteworthy perspective: “I created this chapbook from within a network of dynastic colonial privileges—some earned, many not—and with momentum built upon the white supremacist professional culture that simultaneously infantilizes and empowers people who look and move through society like me.”

Thank you, Black Lawrence Press, for the advance reader copy.