Dragons
There are good dragons and there are bad dragons, pronounces a new mother in Melissa Dickey’s poetry collection. Dragons encapsulates the potency of modern womanhood, with its fearsome potentiality and its perceived limits, and dances between outside expectations and personal desires:
I did what they said: *Hold your baby. Give her a kiss.* I did what they said I did what they said I did.
Dickey’s narrations teem with doubt, with need, with awareness of the roles that women are supposed to play and with hope that those limits are not binding. New motherhood proves to be challenging; a lost family member’s once forgotten words haunt a wood that once seemed full of life.
We are are not who we think we are, it’s clearer all the time.
The exquisite yearning in these lines, coupled with their occasional brutality, makes this an emotionally challenging, and always rewarding, collection.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
