Bottlecap Press, 2024
Chapbook: $10.00
Reviewed by H. M. Cotton
Katherine D. Perry, who previously published Long Alabama Summer in 2017, returns with a power-packed chapbook, Smaller Versions, from Bottlecap Press. In 16 poems, she leads readers through a variety of voices that speak of hardships, from hurricanes and COVID-19 to girlhood in the South. The running line through each encapsulation is persistence—a way to make it through when times get tough, as in “On the First Day of Shelter in Place,” “I know something about survival, and I brace this house for what is to come.”
The chapbook opens with an adolescent girl learning “ . . . how the misery around her connected: / an unchecked power that permeated every boundary” (21-22, “After a Long Break”). And yet, even in the difficulties, Perry’s speakers tingle with restlessness and propel themselves ever forward into new beginnings. This chapbook sparks with narratives of creation as the speakers are at first challenged and then transformed by their experiences.
While these poems contain shifting points of view, sometimes in the “I”, sometimes from the third person, there is always a tension between past and present, between nostalgia and how “vertigo reconstructs memories.” Absence tinges the arc of this collection, and desire and longing fill the gaps left behind. As readers, we traverse a lot of ground as Perry takes us from the summit of Mt. Fuji and the swamp water of the Vietnam War to running barefoot through Magnolia Springs, Alabama. These poems capture microcosms of the human experience through dense visual imagery and clear narrative structure.
With poems in free verse, Perry crafts her lines melodically, as evidenced by the beginning of “The Heart of the Matter”:
Born to a teenage mother,
she danced weekly with white-haired
great-grand parents.
Her oblivion, Pop’s lap
as he sat in a tan vinyl recliner,
spitting into a Planter’s can
filled with tissue and tobacco flakes.
Assonance, consonance, and alliteration run rounds looping back and forth with chains of sonic patterning. And while the speaker in “The Losing of Accents and Languages” details the intentional loss of dialect, there’s no doubt the musicality of a native southern speaker rises to the top of these poems like cream on fresh milk.
Smaller Versions invites the reader into electric moments of truth and takes them spiraling across time until they land at the last poem firmly embedded in the Milky Way, where,
We were created,
moving against entropy,
and we have only a flash of time
to make
a life
a light.
Perry makes the galaxy small enough to devour in bite-sized chunks while utterly transforming in her acts of creation. What’s made minute opens up and blossoms into possibility. And, at the end of it all, the course of this chapbook asks what to do with the complications of love in all its forms and offers up to the reader that “every season requires a different kind of love.”
H.M. Cotton is the managing editor of Birmingham Poetry Review, contributing editor for NELLE, and production manager for both journals. Her writing appears in places such as Raleigh Review, storySouth, and Terrain.Org. She is an MFA student at Warren Wilson and teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
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