The Inside Room

This beautiful and bizarre debut from Andrews focuses on “all the seemingly delicate things that close—/ plants, animals that recoil/ from human touch, my mother’s/ heart, a garnet seed; the small origami devices in grade school.” A mother and father beset by personal demons and a sibling figure who may not have survived childhood haunt these poems like “little drowned children in the sink.” Drawing on Western mythology, Andrews refracts the mother/daughter relationship through the lens of Demeter’s relationship to Persephone; similarly, a relationship between sisters invokes the bond between Procne and Philomela. She enacts the precariousness of this familial system in straightforward syntax, as when she writes “Everything died in that house: cats, dogs, plants./ Nothing grew.” Respite from such feeling is fleeting and rest itself is fraught: “Each time I sleep a sister dies./ She drowns; I wake, an only child.” With the sibling figure, there is solidarity, song, witness and survival; Andrews writes, “We have lasted like the small clothes/ of dead children—not loved/ for themselves, but kept forever.” In exploring such delicate, vulnerable, and mortal phenomena, Andrews’s lines open in magical ways, expanding and contracting with a “tinny music,/ the mouths of the brightly dressed/ host and guest, opening and closing,/ on the other side of the plate glass.” (June)