Review by Jami Macarty
In violet. Inviolate. In her chapbook In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings her attention to homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings. From that fine line between sound and definition, the poet inquires: How does a person who has been violated refrain from perpetrating violation? In other words, how does a person committed to nonviolence conduct herself in a violent world?
In Violet’s ten poems are offered to the reader at a conceptual and analytic vantage from the speaker’s traumatic past. The speaker seems to have acknowledged the “system of stress” and has passed into the rage phase. The rage may be rightful and only natural, but it is what is “gripping the body.” The speaker is comfortable enough taking revenge against “all [her] rapists” in her dreams, but fantasizing about it during waking hours causes discomfort. As a result, she seems to switch focus to the “ones [she’s] hurt.” Such is the despairing struggle between “snuffed” and “saved” in the aftermath of trauma. Yet, each phase of recovery is necessary, all of it together a “healing spell.”
On the pages of In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings to color what “lays years upon [a] body” and the lagging “effects of / the stressor.” In the process, the poems of In Violet take some steps away from “villainy.”
In Violet by Margo LaPierre. Anstruther Press, 2024.
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.