Waltzing with Horses

Waltzing with Horses by Felicia Mitchell is a poetry collection published by Press 53 that I picked up a few years ago and have only just now gotten around to reading. It's a terrific collection that I enjoyed making my slow way through, a poem or two a day usually. Many of the poems are personal and confessional, and a good number of them are about the poet's mother, moving ever closer to death through the pages until, in the collection's last poem, “After the memorial service/ we buried a salamander instead.” In another poem, a keen observation: “In the museum she has made of her living room/ photographs of my mother's life are stacked and pinned/ as if looking at them will take the place of memory.”