The title “Sistas Stay Strong” by Eric Reese feels somewhat misleading when written by a male poet, but it does explain the content of the book of poems. The use of the word "Sistas" is slang for sisters and conveys the African sense of sister meaning family women and women friends. It starts by using consonance and addressing black women. The book provides homage to what black women have endured while using the reinforcement of command to continue with encouragement. Courage is needed as many of the poems show.

Most of the poems read as if the author had read the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters at some time in the past, because they bare the same resemblance to gravestone inscriptions, that tell a brief moment about an individual or providing witness to some event. The poems are all short, tight, discussions that often start with an address to a person and then ends with a sharp note of wisdom at the end. The hooks are in the tight start, the cliffhangers beat a drum, meaning they often have a real impact on the reader.

​Topics vary throughout including the #Metoo movement, prostitution, rape, slavery, media, hair, skin, babies, equality. So as you can see, the poems offer why encouragement is needed. Examples from Sistas Stay Strong:
​
OF COURSE!
 
Was accused of murder
when she was just
avoiding rape.
 
and an example of encouragement:
 
SISTA GO GET IT
 
She didn’t know anything
other than being in the kitchen
but wasn’t intimidated
when she discovered that
she had the same power
to generate money in it
like her white counterparts

​Most of the poems brought back memories for me, the latter of working in a restaurant which has the equality of being where the unskilled first start out. The former "Sista Go Get It", reminded me of the terrible trial I had sat on during jury duty, where a woman was accused of killing her significant other with a kitchen knife. I hadn’t qualified for the jury because I had had previous experience of assault in my history. Later, after the trial finished and I was still on jury duty, I learned from a jury member the murder trial victim had previously killed other partners in self-defense, a psychologist explaining why this often happened. In the murder trial, the woman was black, my coworker’s daughter was white. Regardless of the race issue, the issue of violence, especially toward women is apparent throughout the book.
​
The situation of violence that I was aware of that disqualified me for the jury happened to a daughter of a coworker had stopped to help a man who stopped on the roadside in front of her. When the man came to my friend's daughter's window which she rolled down partially, he punched her in the face. Luckily, the daughter had pepper spray in her car and was able to get away. The police found he had pictures of her in his apartment, he’d followed her for some time.

So my long-winded set of examples is leading to a point, namely that poems don’t exist on their own. They feed from the world we live in, and feed back through the words to the community members, providing tales we can relate to and providing the music of verse to reinforce that things need to be different and can be different.

If you suffer from abuse in your relationship, please read "The Truth About Abusers" an article at Psychology Today.
 
Poems also connect to each other, forming a pattern and texture almost like cloth, that paints a picture that each instance can apply to more than one individual to create the sense that not just one person was wounded, we were all wounded.
 
My view of this collection of poems is that Eric Reese went beyond the Spoon River Collection that captured individuals in a graveyard, to capture the society of living and dead in our society. It connects and reconnects throughout, while being easy to read and understand.
 
In conclusion, this is one of the collections Eric Reese has written and has an opening dedication written by former President Obama. Eric Reese writes from his home in Philadelphia. It will be interesting to see what moves him to write in the future.

Mark Roper was one of the mentors at the Carlow MFA Program Residency at Trinity College this summer. He read two of his poems, including the poem “This” from A Gather of Shadows at the welcome dinner, both about dogs and both quite different. He also introduced many of the guest speakers and had a student doing her thesis reading. I tended to hang out with several of the ladies in the poetry group.

In A Gather of Shadow, Mark Roper offers images of “a moment” when the poet, aware, finds a special quality in the world. Many of these poems are in half tone or shades of gray, the colors seen at dusk when the eye changes from the sharp color of day into a netherworld.  Several of the poems speak about the experience of the poet, when they stop and turn to writing poetry instead of continuing about their everyday experience.

In asking myself what I liked about this collection, I found myself examining specific poems and saying, what did Mark Roper do in this poem.

The most inviting poem for me, “Advent”, frames the experience of doing i.e. “Open the door” with qualities that are hard to define. He moves from concrete into idealistic terms “Darkness, Stillness, Silence” that readers connect with images. By capitalizing each, it’s as if he lived in the time of leprechauns or totemic Gods and he were calling special friends among them into an experience. The repetition of this phrase returns the reader back again and again to where they once experienced those three qualities. The repetition also works because of the rhythmic balance of each item in contrast to the other stanzas and visually because of their italics. The result is readers place themselves in the same position that the poet was in at the time of finding the poem.

In the poem “Falling” the experience of the poet and the experience of a swallow are superimposed, one a top the other and back again. The use of start, stop, up, fall, captures the flight pattern of the swallow. The insertion of these verbs at specific places, shapes the same experience even though every sentence is about the same length, again mirroring the flight of swallows, too and from a wire or nest. The initial comparison is from a person awakening to the swallow. Then the poem follows the swallow but then it returns back to the person as they are about to fall asleep, catching that same start to dream or fly, then stop awake, that occurs when someone is napping when they shouldn’t. Because of that, the imagery turns back to the swallow because they seldom sleep, it seems and because their survival depends on getting food and so perhaps they shouldn’t rest. In essence, this poem works really well by combining specific details about the natural world from two different perspectives and playing them off each other as a reflection as well as connection to the other.

Overall, the poems in this collection are very polished—you never stumble reading them, you never find any weasel words, they are simple and clear to understand. They all connect strongly with nature including places like the saltmarsh, lough, St. Patrick’s cabbage, oystercatchers, thrush, swallows and plovers with life along the river, at sea, by waterfalls.

I took a poetry class at Stanford Continuing Education Online last year taught by Matt Siegel and read a whole series of poetry collections that were new to me Including:

• Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, telling the tale of having to leave his country because of the situation in his country and dealing with memories of family and loves
• Insomniac Diary by Bill Hicok, a very unusual collection of poems dealing with day to day life from an unusual perspective
• Long Division by Alan Michael Parker, a collection unified by the use of counting and math, featuring poems on many aspects of life
• The Vital System by CM Burroughs, a collection based on body, some of desire and intimacy, some with pain
• After Urgency by Rusty Morrison, many poems dealing with the aftermath of the death of the poet's parents, winner of the Dorset Prize
• Nobody's Hell by Douglas Goetsch, a collection using great details and appreciating life
• Please by Jericho Brown, a collection unified by music appreciation and will excellent voice and song in the poems

After I'd been through so many contemporary collections of poems, I started thinking about how poems fit into my life and realized I could write some essays on the topics. It's leading me to reading many of the earlier collections of poems I've read by other poets--most of these were published by Tupelo Press.

Also in the class I read poems from Norton and from Farrar, Straus and Giroux--

• A Village Life by Louise Gluck, a collection unified by the experience of a town throughout a woman's life
• Nothing in Nature is Private by Claudia Rankine, a collection dealing with natural human drives
• The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich, a collection about a woman and her sexuality among other things
• What the Living Do by Marie Howe, a strong collection dealing with a woman's experience of abuse and coming to terms with her feelings about it as she grew up 
  

I've also read two collections from New South featuring a broad range of poets and writers and a collection of Love and Other Passion by the poets of Central Florida. 

I've also started reading more poems in the speculative poetry genre, Prismatica by Elizabeth Barret, and Voyagers by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones.

I'm writing about this en masse because I grew tired of writing book reviews because they don't give me as much flexibility to interact mentally with the poems. Instead I've started working on some essays about my reactions to these and other poems. Writing essays are a lot more work and offer a writer the way to compare and contrast writing or speak about different topics in poetry. I've read poetry for several decades now so in some ways it is freeing while in other ways it prevents the quick turnaround of looking at a collection, writing a review and shoving it on your shelf. 

Some reasons to go back and reread collections you've read before is that this tends to improve your own writing. You tend to look at a polished poem from a collection and say to yourself, how can I improve my own writing. Ways to improve include:

• better use of detail
• more unified collections, i.e. you don't settle for writing one poem on a topic, you dig deeper and see where else grief may take you, or love, or music
• a desire to open the space of your poem more--remove unneeded details and let the wisdom shine on the page
• expand your topics that you write about in poetry from the personal, to witnessing other people, news events, etc.