A Personal Review of "Make Yourself Small"

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality
                    Queen

A woman.

A woman writing poetry.

I keep my guard up.

                      JR

I was a married man back then, the year: 2006. My professor, Michelle Brooks, now author of “Dead Girl, Live Boy” (Storylandia Press, 2011) and “Make Yourself Small” (Backwaters Press, 2011) finished returning each student’s end-of-the-semester writing portfolio. That is: except one.

I waited.

“I still have yours,” she said, and with a gentle, reassuring touch to my forearm she suggested we discuss my stories at a later date.

“You can throw it out,” I said, “I have more copies.” Then I left her classroom, back to a life I’m no longer living, a life where someone had been planning my demise.

This brings me back to Brooks’ latest effort “Make Yourself Small,” a book of poetry that speaks candidly about bad relationships, bad situations. For instance in “A Stranger to Nothing” marriage becomes an escape: He was someone to do things with while / my insides rotted away with thoughts of my / rape years before. Followed by the aptly titled “Bedtime Stories” where the narrator recalls her mother’s warnings: Men hide under cars, slash a woman’s / tendons so she can’t run …

But who should be afraid of whom?

Some of these poems, defense mechanisms of the mind, depict a subtle yet dominant side to the female psyche. In “Fantasy” a woman’s devotion to her man can only be achieved with a baseball bat (or so she fantasizes). In “A Wife That Doesn’t Work” a woman reveals her true motives for matrimony: mostly I feel closet to you when you / are not with me. In those moments you / are the faintest hint of the moon instead / of a man in the shower, trying to erase me. / Marry me so I will not love you anymore.

Five years ago I thought I’d done the right thing by walking away from this female poet, and here it is 2012 and I’m drawn to her and her poems more than ever.

Mark C Durfee, author of “The Line Between,” got it right. On the back cover of “Make Yourself Small” he says: Brooks brings more than honesty to her work; she brings truth. The kind of truth that no one likes to look at but everyone has to see if they are ever going to learn how to make themselves small enough to live demon-free.

I couldn’t agree more. Our wariness toward the opposite sex may never subside; however, after reading “Make Yourself Small” one should have a better understanding of the personal demons that affect us all. This is poetry at its best—a true gut-check to the heart and mind.