Saturday Review: “Challenging Perspective with Persona Poetry,” a review by Michael Beadle of Catherine Pritchard Childress’s Outside the Frame in NCLR Online Spring 2025
Michael Beadle takes a close look at Childress’ recent poetry collection Outside the Frame. Poems such as “Housewife’s Howl,” and “Bathsheba’s Bath” “reimagine women and girls from across time telling their own stories with poignant, provocative voices.” According to Beadle, “each poem carries its own weight while evoking emotions from regret and shame to unabashed sexual desire and tender love.”
The use of women from the Bible along with “rebellious teens, irreverent preacher’s daughter, dreamy sister, and unfulfilled housewife” creates authentic and contemporary women within her collection. The discussion of rebellion from the “demands of older men” is fascinating but also “disheartening to know how little has changed from the desert tent-cities of Biblical Israel to the back seats and board rooms of modern life.”
Read the entire review here in the Spring 2025 issue. Order Outside the Frame here!
