Reviews
Review of A Brief Campaign of
Sting and Sweet
Laura Isabela Amsel
July 1, 2024
Laura Isabela Amsel
A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet
ISBN: 978-1950739134
2024 Brick Road Poetry Press
$17.95, 110 pages, paper
Reviewed by Dave Seter
Childhood can be a time of intense joy and disappointment. An old idiom counsels: children should be seen and not heard. In her poem “Father,” Laura Isabela Amsel writes: “Your stethoscope never did listen / to me” (p. 4). But there’s no containing a voice forever, Amsel proves in her debut collection, A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet. These vivid and incantatory poems demand to be seen and heard.
Amsel offers: “The best poems are ones the poet cannot quite control, the ones that insist on becoming themselves.” We see this idea play out in a childhood memory in “Listening for Something as a Girl, 1910” (p. 6):
My vigilance is visceral;
there is no freeze in me.
I am all ear-swivel
and twitch, amygdala
and head hitch, tail
switch and quick shit,
adrenaline and flinch.
The child seems destined to become the poet, alert to her surroundings. The intensity of life surfaces in subjects of family, childhood, marriage, motherhood, cancer, and divorce. The danger of a child’s overdose plays out in “For All Her Questions” (p. 11):
Had she run away two days or was it five?
A handful of pills or a bottle entire?
Did the boy, panicking, forsake her in the grass,
with squealing tires his hasty leave?
In keeping with the title of the collection, we also find what is sweet, in the joy of two sisters in “Brushy Creek” (p. 18):
With horses, unsaddled, in halters,
we’d start from the sandbar,
ask for a gallop, urge them
into the water.
They’d canter in.
The footing was loose;
they’d stagger on.
But we knew the truth:
those horses flew.
Cimmie and Harley grew wings,
and we were Brushy Creek
goddesses, queens in command…
Sense of place is strong in these poems. They are populated with the inhabitants of Mississippi, including animals such as small, alligator-like, caiman (who are fed salamanders by the father, salamanders collected by the child), birds such as screech owls (from which the father “steals nicker and trill”), various trees (mockernut, sugar maple, pawpaw, red oak) and their lichen (“verdigris-green and leathery-white”).
The poet and her children lend a personal touch to landscape when, in “Naming Moons,” they select names based on local, highly personal, encounters with wildlife, including Coyote Moon, Daffodil, Worms Returning, and so on. In addition to family life, we find occasions of personal sting that must be borne alone, or at least within one’s own body; namely that of cancer, whose possible causes are described in these lines from “Irretrievable” (p. 44):
The FDA, glyphosate, the EPA, BPA
in plastics, asbestos, chasing, as a child, the mosquito
truck’s toxic fog, FD&C red dye forty, mercury fillings,
radioactive mammograms, hazy ultrasounds, every lazy
radiologist who ever missed a massive tumor—
lobular carcinoma likes to hide.
These poems are written with an open heart and with nothing to hide. They speak to the reader in tones of incantation and through the lens of an adult who can still see through the eyes of a child.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
Dave Seter is an ecopoet and the author of Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences, Cherry Grove Collections (2021). His poems and critical works have appeared in Appalachia, Cider Press Review, Confluence, The Hopper, Paterson Literary Review, Raven Chronicles, and other journals. He has received two Pushcart nominations. He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. www.daveseter.com.
A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet
Laura Isabela Amsel
Brick Road Poetry Press ($17.95)
Situated in the natural lushness of the American South and discussing a range of family dynamics, Laura Isabela Amsel’s A Brief History of Sting and Sweet delivers on both the sting and the sweet.
The core subject matter of these poems is family tumult—a cold and abusive father, cancer, raising children, the dissolution of marriage—yet there’s no hint of melodrama; instead, Amsel’s vulnerability encourages connection. Take “First Born,” a poem about becoming a mother:
Looped cord cut free, bagged, he began—
his brown eyes jaundiced moon-yellow. He’d stutter at five,refuse to wear shoes half his life. Dressed in anything
tight, he’d cry. Sock-seams overloaded his senses. He roams now,looking for loose, running from confines—Bulgaria, Thailand.
He wears Tevas in winter to give his toes room.
As much as family, however, the poems also writhe with nature—snakes, salamanders, butterflies, frogs, squirrels, and plants crowd the scene and frequently suggest truths about human life. “Naming Moons” explores a sweet family tradition about full moons, while “Father” details the killing and pinning of butterflies and “Owls” portrays nature as an escape: “One leads the other follows / and I forget to breathe.” Elsewhere, the scar left from a mastectomy is referred to as “tender stem,” while salamanders are “sacred” because their scarcity. In later poems, the speaker finds solace in spring:
Don’t make me beg you, April.
God knows my knees ache
enough already. See me groveling
in March mud, raving,
staving spade holes
with cold fingers, jabbing
zinnia seeds in each.
In addition to using strong imagery, Amsel excels in her playfulness with language. “Listening for Something as a Girl, 1970” is filled with short i sounds and rhymes that speed up the poem and carry the reader away:
My vigilance is visceral;
there is no freeze in me.
I am all ear-swivel
and twitch, amygdala
and head hitch, tail
switch and quick shit,
adrenaline and flinch.
A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet brings us the lovely, the terrifying, and the sad experiences of family life, but in making them all connected to the natural world, it tones down the highs and modifies the lows into something more manageable. We are all part of this world, it seems to suggest—and it’s going to be okay.
Review of Laura Isabela Amsel’s “A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet”
by Christine Vare
October 30, 2024
from sage cigarettes magazine
In life, it’s impossible to reap the benefits of small victories without the personal battles and struggles that allow one to grow and develop. There is a constant push and pull between the forces of kindness, generosity, and love, as these emotions fight the opposition, working to reign triumphant over cruelty, selfishness, and hatred. In fact, every “Beginning will always depend on ending,” as one cannot exist without the other, no matter how difficult that truth can be. Laura Isabel Amsel contains and captures this dynamic in the poems contained within “A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet.” Amsel distills this human experience into vignettes that capture the causes and effects felt after dealing with a challenging father-daughter relationship, a startling divorce, and navigating the physical and mental aspects of breast cancer. While the emotions involved here can be universal human experiences, the way that Amsel writes them into her poems is wholly and uniquely her own.
The speaker of these poems is defiant: she refuses to be tamed or silenced, despite her father’s best efforts. The repeated equestrian images shed light on these tensions and spotlight the speaker’s tenacity to resist “a tight gag rigged to stop her gallop / and staunch her noisy neighing.” Many of the verses in this volume are written in skinny stanzas, filled with quick, sharp, staccato rhythms, achieved via specific word choices. In some of the poems, this rhythm serves to underscore the back-and-forth exchanges similar to a boxing match, a partner dance, or most notably, horses galloping. These lines are dynamic and kinetic, written with energy that bubbles under the surface threatening to spring forth: “and we were Brushy Creek / goddesses, queens in command / of sandy creek bottom, / of giddy, / of quick glance and grin, / of chin-nod and go.” Plentiful allusions to nature abound, in particular to bees, wolves, and salamanders, especially with regard to their hunting and feeding behaviors. But where there is raw brutality, there also lies a tender beauty.
However, the speaker is also clear to caution that while beauty can beguile and arise from seeming disaster, it can likewise transform back into something sinister, dangerous, or evil: “sweet cream / covered up in buzzing honey still stinging like the bees.” Often the pain can be contained within the speaker herself as her own body threatens to end her, forcing her to become hollow, carcass-like after surviving breast cancer. The speaker once again refuses to bend to the will or needs of others: “no numb ensemble for someone else’s pleasure.” Her body is hers and hers alone, but she also feels like a husk of herself as she moves forward. She seeks omens, faith, and healing throughout this section of the book: “An egret, she assumes, the holiest of omens, is a plastic bag / billowing in the cold.” The speaker reflects on her life via the present struggle of finding herself once more in the space “between me and not being me.”
All the while, she needs to reconcile her past and continue her pursuit of overcoming and advancing, in order to discover who she is despite her trauma. In the poem, “Moon Waiting to be Named,” her son’s game of naming moons becomes a metaphor for her own search for identity. While the moon is constant, it is likewise ever-changing through cycles and phases, much like the speaker’s roles as daughter, mom, and wife. The speaker’s children are getting older, and she is navigating how this relationship will change. She searches where “lithe words and horses hide” hoping to find “hoof-prints / left in dust,” clues, hints, and guides for her path onward, but she also doesn’t remain in a beautifully reflective space for too long.
The mood of the poems becomes more somber as she tackles the end of her marriage: “Light hovers / between stay and go.” The speaker once again turns to nature as a source of enlightenment and a means to process these complicated emotions, as she feels like “a weeping / willow; a river rushing over rocks.” She likens her home to a “mud-cupped nest,” and her husband to a “strip of razor-spikes / he hammers to the windowsill / each spring to keep the birds from nesting.” This is such an apt way to describe the differences that arose between the speaker and her husband as if nature was perhaps foreshadowing the deterioration of their marriage. The resilience of the speaker shines through as she is determined to find her lost self once more: “When did I lose you? Bold you? Brazen golden-curled you?” in her “perfumed bed of petals the past has loosed.” She recalls the times when she was reckless in her travels and is invigorated by this reunion. “I’m only collecting / evidence my life will grow back…” as she discovered a “goldfinch, / refeathered, yellow, preened to glowing.” For a final time, nature has her way and is able to reveal signs of regeneration to the speaker, as she begs the seasons to assist her in blooming into her newly imagined self: “April, get me drunk enough / on perfume to forget.”