Liquid Amber Press (2024)

Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit

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This collection of intense, visceral and surprising poems delivers a kind of everyday erotic where human intimacies and fragilities are explored through a range of domestic situations and as the poet experiences female rites of passage.

This is the third collection from award-winning Melbourne-based Stephanie Powell who has been the recipient of both the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize (2021) and the 2024 Ada Cambridge Prize. Her previous collections include Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023) and Bone (Halas Press, 2021).

We are thrown straight into poems about sex or the lack of it experienced by inanimate objects. In ‘Sex Objects’ [3], the opening poem,

                        … the birdbath angel

                        holding up the dish

                        a brimming satellite

                            offering a drink to

                        heaven behind

                            snapped-thighed clouds –

 

                        crackling after

                        a year without sex

This compares with the poetic narrator’s own ‘limp dreams / adrift in my sheets.’

We move from a poem exploring the anxiety of COVID-19 in ‘Anxiety’ [4-5] to poems of teenage concerns through to medical poems such as ‘Fertility Investigation, Ultrasound 1’ [28] where:

                        CHILDLESS behaves differently

                        Next to by choice

                        Or without choice

 

                        The word Ovary placed

                        Near Polycystic …

Place is vital to poems in this collection and in ‘Vessels of brilliance’ [30-31], we visit the strip mall where

                        We are vessels

                        Of:

 

                        Lilac and lemon

                        Lip-glass

                        Cheap melon perfume

 

                        Vessels

                        For:

 

                        Dirty old men

 

In ‘Touch free wash’ [38], the scene of the poem is The Servo where the poet writes as if the action of the poem is taken from CCTV images, where ‘the air is red with mist and coloured light. I close my eyes and each sound is its own machine … we must go on living. … I must stay upright a little longer, until the water cures or kills me.’

So often in Powell’s poems, bedsheets spin in the washing machine, the fridge hums and the most important (though tiny) moments of life occur in banal settings of hyper awareness. Powell makes an art of close observation where she sheds light on small moments, interested in how bodies interact in these spaces/places at a micro level.

A brilliant example is in ‘You, luteal wanting’ [26-27]:

                        You, leaving the house on a tram that splits the atmosphere

                        like a worm dancing on the soil

                        under riderless clouds counting the stops, a rollcall of

                        acquaintances –

                        …

                        now

 

                        the last page of your book rests between your thumb and

                        index finger, spine flexing in your hands …

                        …

                        you, reset to factory settings, the reeds on the embankment

                        shiver, then go still

 

Powell explores a host of female matters such as ovulation, pregnancy, fertility, being childless and the mortification of having to experience certain medical procedures. The poems move from adolescence right through to a section about pregnancy titled ‘Flate’, meaning to feel or experience nausea. The poems in this section have titles like ‘Ultrasound Reports’ [68], ‘Elegy to self, 8 weeks pregnant’ [67] and ‘Pregnant, eating oranges, tastes like a family holiday’ [71]. In the third of these, the narrator’s morning sickness reminds her of nausea she experienced when younger during a Great Barrier Reef expedition, remembering that

                        I held an orange wedge

                        between my teeth like a

                        mouth guard

                        juice broiling

                        …

                        wet suit backs gleaming

                        like porpoise skin

                        the nausea didn’t pass

                        until we made it

                        back to land

                        my fingertips stinging

                        and raw with citrus

 

These are playful poems that employ many different forms. ‘Night worker, questionnaire’ [11-12] is a poem structured as a series of (y/n) questions with an ‘Additional Comments’ section at the end. There are prose poems such as ‘Tank’ [44]; a poem called ‘Class’ [29] in the shape of an inverted triangle about a time when the poem’s narrator didn’t close her legs at school; contrapuntal poems such as ‘Off-season’ [65-66]; poems that rely on repetition such as ‘We are young and delicious’ [47]; and poems of 2-line, 3-line and 4-line stanzas.

I found these poems to be fresh and zesty, full of linguistic invention, and refreshingly honest. The poet says the things we’re too self-conscious to say whether it is ‘aching to finger the freckle on a stranger’s neck’ in ‘Untitled, Parliament’ [8-9] or ‘Feeling sexy? Bending over to scoop up my knickers, rolls of stomach like cloud on thighs,’ in the genius poem ‘Feeling Sexy?’ [39].

Powell navigates the strange unpredictability of being female with humour and often breathtaking imagery, her confessional voice one that many readers will both closely relate to and relish.