Book Review :: Open Leaves by Harryette Mullen
Review by Jami Macarty
In this gorgeous Black Sunflowers Poetry Press poet and artist series chapbook, Harryette Mullen’s haiku and essayettes grow in a garden of delights and despairs along with Tiffanie Delune’s lush floral tableaus.
Mullen’s Open Leaves: poems from earth is a study and choice of attention:
Every flower a
reminder of all that we
miss when not looking.
Of course, where there are gardens, there are plants, their watering and growth, hungry grasshoppers, and a “Kneeling gardener.”
Given the rapaciousness encouraged by the business magnates who brought to society PayPal, Tesla, Amazon, etc., in this context gardening is resistance. And, it is the insistence on connection—to family and Earth.
In Mullen’s poems, gardening is connected especially to the strong women in her family: “Somehow, after he’d left, and his father had died, his mother held on to their acres, even during the Great Depression, and beyond.” Great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother taught her: “You won’t starve if you can grow your own food. If you take care of your green patch, it will take care of you.”
Despite “snagged skin, / bruised fruit, hurt feelings,” gardening offers Mullen a sense of being “Firmly planted here” and a place for sustaining inquiry and her life: “When she scoops a handful of black earth, she thinks of living things that keep the soil alive.”
Gentle Reader, read these poems, and your heart blossoms, your soul alive!
Open Leaves: poems from earth by Harryette Mullen; artwork by Tiffanie Delune. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
