Review of Kalehua Kim's "Mele"

Kalehua Kim, Mele (Trio House Press, 2025) 100 pages, poetry, forthcoming on July 1, 2025. More info here.

Kalehua Kim explores themes of death, family dynamics, and the relationship between mother and daughter in this collection of songs as poetry. I was excited about this as an indigenous work. It seemed to have a lot of potential as a book that has many layers of possible understanding and prisms of viewpoints. 

I was especially eager to learn some Hawaiian until I discovered that each time Hawaiian appears in the text, it is a repetition of an English phrase that has already occurred, making it merely decorative - a flower to signal that this is an indigenous poet - but serving no real depth of purpose in most cases. Identity as product placement?

My favourite parts of this collection are those that focus on the poet's personal memories of her mother: how she used to sing all the time, the songs they used to share, and the intimate moments by her deathbed. These moments carry the weight of depth and of real soul. This is where we feel closest to the emotional need that drives the poet to write in the first place and where the poetry feels the most original.

Favourite lines:

"I have lost all but one tale/ you told to me in childhood./ Days were longer then," - "Ka Hale, The Nurturing Place"

"You yearn for the days when your people died/ in the beds in which they were born." - "Dying Looks Like"

"we shared so/ many words/ all we didn't say/ full" - "Glottal Stop: My Mother's Last Words"

"Other mothers find me here://... they all come to me, mothers mothering me/ Mothering with a silence that is not her silence." - "Not One Parking Space"

"His silence, humid and thick as thunder,/ hangs heavier than the sun-sapped mangoes" - "Memory Sonnet"

"No cloth can keep you clean" - "Woman's Work"

"My belly ready to spill its light// ... I pushed until I broke open with light." - "Makalii and the Stars That Followed"

"the only way to look at time is to refuse to see time" - "Ha"

"The weight of fruit strengthens/ the branch eventually." - "Songs for the Life I Chose or How to Stay Together"

Review of Han VanderHart's "Larks"

Han VanderHart, Larks (Ohio State University Press, 2025) 86 pages, poetry, forthcoming at the time of this writing. More info here.

There's a lot going in this collection in a comparatively brief space. VanderHart covers subjects as variable as sibling-on-sibling child sexual abuse, mental illness, generationally changing values on parenting, a love of nature and herbalism and birds, a deep sense of place, etc. All written in a familiar Appalachian voice (but not the Appalachian language. Not to worry, if you are from elsewhere, this is written in standard American English but the Appalachian voice very much comes through). A lot of the poem titles are quotes, revealing that VanderHart has understood the assignment of every good writer: they read more than they write. 

They hook you in with some comfortable poems that root you in place without explicitly naming that place. And then they land the punches of the real battles this book tip-toes around. I say "tip-toes", because as hard-hitting as some of this is, there is always the feeling that VanderHart is holding back, swallowing the worst, because they know it's too much for us. I respect that.

Favourite lines:

"I do not know whether it is morning           or mourning" - "Invocation"

"My mother's family dammed the river and trapped the fish so often/ it became their name." - "The Body Is Water and the Water Has Origins"

"I think you should use the language/ of where you come from" - "Artist's Statement In a Mountain Cabin"

"Some things you fix/ and they break again/ and again" - "Broken"

"I measure your beginning by a glass of water and the hands that/ caught you. Somewhere" - "How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them" Ann Carson

"... what's inside the heart and also/ the land: the dirt containing more" - "Virginia seemed like always right" David Lynch

"I Can't Let My Mind Go to the Thicket" - whole poem

"I want an otherworldly ex-/ planation for unkindness, which // is the milk of the world." - "Larks"

Ohio University State Press is a BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ Press.