Sprawling poems of queer, unrequited love and New York City.

Great for fans of Ellen Bass, Julie R. Enszer’s Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry.

POETRY Behind Her City Eyes Sarah Erin | 21 Chieftans Press 112p, trade paper, $15, ISBN 979-8-218-17061-5

Erin’s second poetry collection, following the mental-health exploration of Secrets Make You Sick, is an intimate exploration of a woman’s unspoken, unrequited love for another woman, whose maximalist, cascading, and chaotic poems unfurl the depths of reverence, lust, and grief on the speaker’s end of a onesided relationship. A second love is also entwined in Erin’s verses of feminine yearning, one that evokes for the poet a “visceral inner knowing, I’m home”: the poet’s deep love for Manhattan, for “wandering avenues” and the city’s voices, which are intimately bound up with that first love. “I can’t pinpoint when I was originally able to distinguish your accent from every other New Yorker around us when you spoke,” the poet writes, before celebrating a memory that can be pinned down, the moment of first feeling love.

Erin’s table of contents is titled “directions” and features a subway map in the margins, setting the stage for a collection that channels New York City, as in “Sinatra Pours”: “In old New York the rain // resembles how I would imagine it feels // to kiss you.”. Extravagant as the city that anchor’s the poet’s identity, Erin’s mainly free verse poetry is perhaps overly abundant with alliteration and mixed metaphors, and her form choices, which include irregular indentations, line breaks, and spacing, lend a degree of theatricality to the reading experience. Some poems possess refreshing moments of clarity that examine the role of self-image in the experience of womanhood.

“Face Paint” and “Mirror Mirror on the Wall” both explore the poet’s observation of her beloved’s perception of her physical appearance, which is fraught with silent critique and self-hatred. As she watches the woman she loves put on makeup, the speaker notes “what I see is a stunning work of art, // and I’m afraid that you only see the paint.” It is in these poems that Erin’s collection is most engaging, but for some readers in love with love and New York Erin’s verses will resonate.

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