Reviewed by Danielle Hanson
Sweetbitter
ISBN: 978-1951979287
2022, Sundress Publications
$16, 92 pages, paper
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Fairytales have always been a means to explore what scares us—wolves and witches and being lost in the forest. The poems in Stacey Balkun’s latest collection Sweetbitter are fairytales, and the fears within them are very real threats—environmental pollution killing fathers in a suburb, teenage boys hunting girls in the woods, growing up and apart from loved ones. The poems look back on a childhood in the Possumtown neighborhood of Piscataway, NJ, site of a former Union Carbide plant AND a former atomic bomb test site, and are peopled by adolescents untended by adults.
The two main characters of the book are the speaker, as a youth, often referred to as possum-girl, and her best friend apple-child. They are inseparable and wild, fearing nothing but the boys, as in the poem “Lure”:
Before the boys came ….
Of course we knew
Who was the hunter
Who was the prey
Balkun weaves in wolves (both the speaker and the boys become wolves), grandmothers’ houses, and scenes set in the woods. But she also overtly brings in myths and tales. Eve from the Bible is scattered throughout the poems, and Little Red [Riding Hood], but the most frequent visitor is Daphne, from Greek mythology, a girl turned into a tree as she tries to escape being hunted by a male god. From “In the Forest”:
we did not dream of escape until we did, each tree a girl
who couldn’t scream, our bones ringing like bells
The second of three sections of the book is a long, sectioned piece entitled “Book of Red” (after Little Red), which alternates between first-hand recollections of growing up and factual news-like segments describing the environmental devastation of the Superfund site, such as a radioactivity assessment using the scenario of a teenager from a nearby neighborhood hiking for two hours a week on the site. The scientific nature of the descriptions only heightens the sense of danger for Red.
Balkun expertly illustrates the feeling of danger and loss of growing up girl in a compromised American suburb with its ordinary dangers of experimentation, the deterioration of close friendships, and the extraordinary dangers of pollution. The book is environmental, feminist, human, good.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 6.
Danielle Hanson strives to create and facilitate wonder. She is author of Fraying Edge of Sky, winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Prize, and Ambushing Water, Finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year Award. She is on the Editorial Board at Sundress Publications and teaches poetry at the University of California, Irvine. You can read more about her at daniellejhanson.com.
Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter, Eppur Si Muove, Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak, and Lost City Museum and co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest and Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest, her work has appeared in or will appear in Best New Poets 2018, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, Terrain, Prairie Schooner, New South, Crab Orchard Review, and other anthologies and journals. She holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn and The Loft. Visit her online at staceybalkun.com.
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