Out Loud Huntsville: A Year in Review 2024

Out Loud Huntsville: A Year in Review 2024 

Edited by Kimberly Casey 

Out Loud HSV, 2025 

Paperback: $12.00 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Foster Dickson 

Out Loud Huntsville’s ninth Year in Review anthology contains poems from twenty-six distinctly diverse writers, who dub themselves a “spoken word community.” The anthology, edited by Kimberly Casey, is organized alphabetically by the poets’ last names, or in the case of one, by his only name. The author bios at the end of the book reveal that the contributors run the gamut: some from creative writing backgrounds, which is to be expected, and among the others: a technical writer, a journalist, theater folks, scientists and engineers, several writers from other parts of the country and of the world, a handful who write under pseudonyms, and even one self-described “cultural enigma.”  

Unlike some multi-author poetry collections, Out Loud Huntsville’s does not open with a prose introduction by the editor. Instead, the reader is launched straight into the poems, starting with Frankie Allen’s “The Aspiration of an Offspring,” a free-verse testimonial about wanting encouragement. A few pages later, Grace Dellis’s “My Boss Convinced Me to Download a Dating App” carries us through the thoughts of a divorced single mother who might like to experience a fresh kind of romance again. A few more pages in, Bryan Dugger’s existential rumination “In Defense of Sandcastles” wonders about hubris and mutability.  S. Hazen Guthrie’s “Where the Soul Sails” follows, asking, “Where does the soul go when the mind leaves?” Having perused the author bios before beginning, I was interested in what poet Lona Gynt would have to say, as it’s revealed that the name is a “psuedopseudonym” for a persona that is “the lovechild of Peer Gynt,” a character in one of Henrik Ibsen’s plays. Her three poems seek self-discovery in a way we might expect, given the choice of pen name.  

Carrying the reader across the midpoint in the collection is Kundai Karima’s “The Letter,” a monologue-like missive about finding meaning in life written to an unnamed “you,” which is then followed by Jarrod Lacy’s “I Have a Moment.” In the latter, we find “an / urge to know my helplessness is / an endeavor to blend with peace.” Anna Milligan’s poems, then, sport titles that move away from these more abstract concerns and toward the sexual: “Salirophilia,” which means being aroused by someone who has a full bladder, and “We Can Fuck in the Astral Plane.” The poet Paul N offers a disjointed narrative about the modern workplace in “Good Jobs,” and his poems are followed by three from Bojana Nikolic, an aerospace engineer from Serbia. Her “. . . B2024” explains how the best poems may be the “unfinished” ones. The anthology closes with Ellie Wulff’s “Please Forgive Me for Remembering,” a mosaic-like consideration of the choice not to be a mother. 

The term anthology translates to “a gathering of flowers,” and this Year in Review 2024 is an appropriate example of that idea. Though some contributors have three or four poems included, while others only have one, each poet and each poem seem to be given equal standing within the overall arrangement. There is no introduction informing our thoughts prior to reading, and the poets’ works are put in order simply enough, using the alphabet as a guiding principle, meaning that even the editor’s work is nestled among the others. What we have here is an opportunity to experience one hundred pages of poetry coming out of just over two dozen styles and perspectives. I will add that I found it useful, since the group is centered on spoken word, to read the poems – as their collective name would invite – out loud as I went through. While we don’t have the individual poets’ performances to help us lead us toward emphasis or meaning, they still make a strong showing on the page.   

Foster Dickson is a writer, editor, and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama.