Review of Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them
by Ellen Stone

Reviewed by Shannon K. Winston

In Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them (Mayapple Press, 2025), Ellen Stone explores themes of motherhood, loss, and survival. The opening poem, “A wrist, a wren, a small knife,” deftly sets the tone for the collection. It unfolds through a series of contrasts between the speaker’s perceptions and reality, as illustrated in the lines: “What I thought was an accordion dangling from an open window / turned out to be a man’s arm, his shirt sleeve wrinkled in the summer // evening” (7). The repeated phrase “what I thought” emphasizes the tension between expectation and actuality. Rather than reinforcing binaries, these contrasts engender a multiplicity of meanings, unsettling our assumptions about the world. By the end, the poem becomes an homage to the speaker’s mother, evoked as “a wrist, a wren,” and embodied in the poem’s shifting, breathtaking imagery.

Indeed, the collection’s use of vivid, shifting imagery is one of its greatest strengths. Stone brilliantly explores the complexities of motherhood, caretaking, and loss via the moon and light. Her imagery, at once lush, beautiful, and joyful, is also marked by sorrow and longing—evoking layered emotional realities. Like many images in the collection, light implies darkness—they are, in short, two sides of the same coin. In “Bright Side of the Moon,” the poem begins: “Shining like a lamp holding us in her steady beam / until there was nothing left, and she went dark” (11). The phrase “went dark” is a powerful and understated way of capturing not only the mother’s passing, but also her struggle with depression.

The speaker’s mother’s mental illness is often evoked through references to darkness, as in “Mother Goes to the Underworld,” and a later poem in which black walnuts lead to the image of the mother “wilting into the bedclothes while the biochemicals her own brain / produced sent her so deep, it took years to pull her back out” (63). The transition from light to darkness in this poem, and throughout the collection, captures the emotional weight of the mother’s decline and passing. In the final poem, the speaker swims in a pond just before her 65th birthday and thinks of her mother:

I could be a sunfish wriggling in the cold green
but these phases of the July moon trail me instead
where I see my mother now that she has risen—
discreet, solitary, ready to disperse (81).

With a keen eye and attention to detail, Stone paints a vibrant scene with “cold green” water and the moon “trail[ing] me instead.” Like the moon, the speaker’s mother is ever-present—shining a light on the speaker and shaping her experience of motherhood. Stone also uses subtle, precise moon imagery to evoke the mother’s struggles with loss. In “Instructions on Leaving Mother,” the poet advises, “you must find her / outside the kitchen window, pale, waning // where just days ago, she was here” (26). With nimble, expert descriptions, Stone draws on the natural world to evoke complex experiences of aging and grief.

While Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them often draws on the natural world to explore family dynamics and coming-of-age, it also uses rich descriptions of food to recount important domestic memories and milestones. In “Cream Puffs,” Stone’s depiction of “[c]loud-sweet fluff” (14) immerses the reader in a vivid scene, highlighting both the pleasure and scarcity of food. The poem ends poignantly: “God knows / what we’ll have / for dinner” (14). In “Potatoes,” the “milky [potato] discs” are likened to the moon (14), blending the domestic with the celestial.

Through lush metaphors and associative leaps, Stone re-creates the magic of childhood. Many of the speaker’s most significant memories unfold around food, recipes, and cooking. In “Planted,” the speaker grapples with complicated feelings about her pregnancy while drinking a vanilla shake at a café. Meanwhile, “Recipe for a Daughter Leaving” uses the structure of a recipe to guide the speaker through the emotional process of coping with loss.

Reading Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them feels like moving through an entire life beside the speaker. Childhood memories, coming-of-age moments marked by trauma, marriage, and motherhood, unfold with quiet precision. Though the themes are sweeping, Stone approaches them through grounded, everyday scenes—each poem shaped as a discrete, self-contained moment. The result is a layered collection that draws the reader in through intimate detail and emotional depth that will appeal to a wide audience.

 

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 6.

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