Saturday Review: “Poetry of Place” a review by Chris Abbate in NCLR Online Winter 2024 of Forever Eighty-Eights (2022) by Molly Rice
Memory provides poetry the possibility to recreate and transmute trauma into beauty. Rice creates from this memory for her latest collection. Abbate reflects, “In Forever Eighty-Eights, Rice’s reckoning with the place of her origin, a place of both hurt and healing, conveys an undeniable need for connection.”
Abbate starts the review with the poem “McAdenville,” where Rice grew up, a small mill town halfway between Charlotte and Gastonia. The poems deal with not only Rice’s own personal history, but also that of the town, as well. Abbate tells us, “These and other coming-of-age poems portray a young speaker in relation to her surroundings, carving out her life under the historical weight of a town.”
Abbate draws from over a dozen different poems for the review. “In “Singer,” she recalls her grandmother sewing skirts and costumes for her and attempting to teach her to sew. Rice recognizes the precision and
skill her grandmother possessed. She calls her “a pro” while also expressing a more symbolic undertone to her sewing: “Her / Patterns / Forever stitched in me.”’
Read the entire review in the Online Winter 2024 issue out now! And order the book from our friends at Press 53.
