Laura E. Garrard is a CranioSacral Therapist on the Olympic Peninsula. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Bellevue Literary Review, Amethyst, The Madrona Project,Silver Birch, and Pangryus. Her chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, is available through Finishing Line Press. Winner of the Merit Prize for the 2024 Stories That Need to be Told Contest and Pushcart Prize nominee with TulipTree Publishing, she has also been a finalist for the John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She’s written a series, Poetry That Fits, on Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org and holds a master’s degree in journalism. Reach her at: LauraEGarrard.com Photo credit: Amy Collett
Note: See also “A Conversation with Laura E. Garrard,” Lauren Davis in conversation with Laura E. Garrard,author of Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death,Finishing Line Press, 2026
Load-Bearing Walls, by Linda B. Myers Published by Finishing Line Press, 2026 Semi-finalist, 2025 Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Contest Review by Laura E. Garrard
Linda B. Myers is among the poets in my Port Angeles, Washington circle. Still, we were surprised to learn that we both had entered Finishing Line Press’ 2025 Open Chapbook Competition and were offered contracts. Since then, we’ve learned more about one another, though, honestly, I had appreciated her debut poetry collection, Load-Bearing Walls, before I learned that she is as candid and clever as her poetry. The author of ten novels now gifts readers with this moving, hard-hitting chapbook.
Myers dedicates her book to the “load-bearing walls [that] support one another” but told viewers (during an interview filmed in December 2025), that these supports “may not be the best for you.” This points to the type of stories that show up in this collection of well-crafted, achingly honest poems. The first lines of the title poem read “Consider my starting point: / Body beached wreckage, knee bent as driftwood.”
In Load-Bearing Walls, Myers describes the challenges of caretaking, dealing with dying friends and spouse, bodily and mental disease, environmental fire catastrophes, and aging. Myers uses humor, ire, and wit to breathe into grief. She also includes narratives from earlier times. The poems are free verse except for one stunning, coming-of-age pantoum, titled, “Autumn of ’63,” in which she seamlessly intertwines Kennedy’s assassination with the “innocence that died that day on a grassy knoll.” A young feminist-in-the-making appears in a childhood story about cowboy films in “Saddle Up”; and camaraderie leaning toward “seduction” with a male colleague, shows up in “Rainmakers.”
When I interviewed Myers, I learned that she’d led a successful advertising and marketing career during the Madman era, a time when women more often became teachers or secretaries. This experience appears in “Rainmakers,” a poem with stanzas headed with slogans, such as “Business sense is real.” She writes, “Like traveling preachers we led them to the promised land, / the heights of business class where they so longed to belong.” A physical line isn’t crossed on business trips, but readers feel the tension between the two characters in this line, “Skin electric to each other’s gesture . . .”
Myers’ work speaks to those who’ve been traumatized like myself (I have been dealing with a chronic blood cancer) by affirming that we aren’t alone and using eloquent language, images, and descriptions to do so. I wanted to sit beside “Watermelon Girl” on the concrete and cry with her when, exhausted from caretaking, she opens her car hatch only for a watermelon to roll onto the driveway and split open. In this poem, Meyers writes, “I’m too hot, too tired till crows scold me to move.” Yet, “the storm passes” and she eats the center of the melon with her hands, “sticky juice drizzling down my chin, / consuming the heart like a hunter.” I found Watermelon Girl’s strength to carry on inspiring: “Wiping my fingers on my cotton shirt I bend, / lift the grocery bags and climb the stairs.”
Myers’ collection includes a series of elegies with endearing descriptions such as Barry’s “XL essence” in the poem “Phone Ghost.” Myers further writes,
He was immense cedar strong a bellow of laughter his chosen song.
One of my favorite poems in the book, “21,000 Days,” reflects on the passing of Myers’ mother. In the poem, the narrator visits her mother’s coffin containing the departed’s daily dairies, which speak to her: “She breathes her memories into my heart.” In an action of self-grace, the narrator decides to remove the twelve dairies and “carry her history home,” by saving words that should not “be buried alive, these words that outlast writers.”
Myers elegizes her husband in several poems. A startling confession in the short poem, “Bedtime,” is “If you should die before I wake, / I will not pray for you.” In “An Unkindness of Words,” she offers a rebuttal after the death. To his words, “I don’t love you anymore,” the caretaker retorts, “I am crazed as an old enamel vase laced with blue veins, / but the vessel and I both still hold water.” Finally, the poet tenderly memorializes her husband with the release of his ashes in “Peninsula Currents”:
He dances invisibly in the fiber of this nurturing land. He’ll not leave nor will I a place with greater sense of found than lost.
Collectively, these poems show how our support for one another is the most important source of love that we can rely on in a world that is “caging brown babies” (in, “Load-Bearing Walls”). Frustration is evident in the lines, “I shake my arthritic fist until even I / am tired of me.” The poem poses that a “way to someplace new” might be a “Sanctuary for old women” who “listen, / take strength from those overcoming damage.”
Whether found riding on the back of a scooter in Hawaii or attending jury duty in a small town in Washington, the stories in Load-Bearing Walls, light “campfires,” that show how the “rise” of the “thing with feathers … hasn’t flown from us yet.”
Linda B. Myers traded snow boots for rain boots and moved from a marketing career in Chicago to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula where she is now part of the Old Growth. She has Indy published ten novels, writes a monthly op/ed piece for the Sequim Gazette, and is a co-founder of Olympic Peninsula Authors, a group devoted to promoting the many fine authors out here in the wild. Load-Bearing Walls from Finishing Line Press is her first poetry chapbook. Her poetry has also appeared in Cirque Literary Journal of the Pacific North Rim, Poetry Breakfast, Unleash Lit, Empty Bowl’s Madrona Series, and several other anthologies. Reach her at: LindaBMyers.com. Photo credit: Donna Whichell
Laura E. Garrard is a CranioSacral Therapist on the Olympic Peninsula. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Bellevue Literary Review, Amethyst, The Madrona Project,Silver Birch, and Pangryus. Her chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, is available through Finishing Line Press. Winner of the Merit Prize for the 2024 Stories That Need to be Told Contest and Pushcart Prize nominee with TulipTree Publishing, she has also been a finalist for the John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She’s written a series, Poetry That Fits, on Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org and holds a master’s degree in journalism. Reach her at: LauraEGarrard.com Photo credit: Amy Collett
Note: See also “A Conversation with Laura E. Garrard,” Lauren Davis in conversation with Laura E. Garrard,author of Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death,Finishing Line Press, 2026
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
Lisa Hall Brownell is a writer and editor. Her novel “Gallows Road” was published by Elm Grove Press in 2022 and has been featured in Kirkus Review, the Historical Novel Review,Connecticut Magazine, and elsewhere. She is finishing her second novel Vee’s Bracelet and a collection of short stories, Sidetracks. Lisa earned an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from San Francisco State University and edited SFSU’s literary magazine Transfer. She is a graduate of Brown University where she wrote poetry and plays and worked in the university bookstore.
Ellen Miller-Mack is a poet, nurse practitioner, & blues lover. “Hot Tamale Blues” can be heard Tuesday afternoons at WMUA 91.1 FM (www.wmua.org.) Ellen has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her reviews and poems can be found in Lavender Review, Lily Review, Rattle, Rumpus, MER, Affilia, Valparaiso Poetry Review and others. She co-authored The Real Cost of Prisons (PM Press). She co-hosts “Poet Talk” which is broadcast live from WMUA on Thursday evenings . “Poet Talk” is also a podcast on Spotify. Ellen lives in Western Massachusetts.
Nadja Maril’s chapbook Recipes from My Garden, a compendium of poems and short essays centered around herbs, a kitchen garden, and family memories, was published by Old Scratch Press, in September (2024). Maril’s prose and poetry has been published in literary magazines that include, Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Review and Across the Margin. A former journalist and editor, Nadja has an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. To read more of her work and follow her weekly blog posts, visit Nadjamaril.com. https://nadjamaril.com/
Mary Warren Foulk has been published in Fjords Review, The Hollins Critic, Pine Hills Review, Palette Poetry, Silkworm, and Steam Ticket, among other publications. Her work also has appeared in Who’s Your Mama? The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers (Soft Skull Press), (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications), and My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems (Ghost City Press). Her chapbook, If I Could Write You a Happier Ending, was selected by dancing girl press (2021) for their annual series featuring women poets. Her manuscript Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) won first place in The Poetry Box’s 2021 chapbook contest. Her manuscript Self-Portrait with Erosion was a finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Poetry Award, and the Inlandia Institute’s 2022 Hillary Gravendyk Prize.
Maria McLeod, is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Mother Want and Skin. Hair. Bones. She’s won the WaterSedge Chapbook Contest, Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize. She works as a professor of journalism for Western Washington University.
Dangerous Women, by Jesi Bender Published by Dancing Girl Press Review by Jennifer Saunders
Patriarchy can transform nearly anything about a woman into a threat. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is frequently criticized for paying too much attention to her wardrobe, but when Janet Yellen—secretary of the Department of the Treasury—appeared before Congress wearing a suit she had worn in public five weeks previously, she was criticized for that. Meanwhile, in 2014, Australian TV host Karl Stefanovic wore the same suit on air every day for a year as an experiment, and nobody noticed. Hillary Clinton was regularly criticized for being “shrill” but when she softened one debate appearance with a laugh and a shoulder shake, she was deemed unserious. It’s the classic double-bind: damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Which is why, in Jesi Bender’s poetry chapbook Dangerous Women, the “Married Woman” and the “Unmarried Woman” can both be declared dangerous. The “Young Woman” is a threat, but so is the “Old Woman.” There is either the “Beautiful Woman” or the “Unseen Woman.” The “Woman Apart” is suspect, but so are the “Women Together.” Why, it’s almost as if it’s the fact of womanhood rather than any particular behavior that’s considered threatening under patriarchy.
Too smart dumb blond too pretty what a dog too loud too pushy too bitchy too much. Who does she think she is?
The poems in Dangerous Women pair these archetypal threats with poems inspired by literary and historical figures ranging from Jezebel to Georgia O’Keeffe (who, it should be noted, once said, “The men like to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.”). Bender lays the foundation in her opening poem “Womb Wounds” (archetype, The First Woman) which traces misogyny back to the story of Eve. “All daughters of the same black Eve / she in us birthed sin,” Bender writes. What could have been a source of power—the birthing womb—is reduced to pain, leaving those giving birth to “[b]ear this burden with a grin” and to become “broken bones.”
The line “Now—where is her heart, the core of her flesh” from “JesiBelle Waits For the Hounds” (archetype, The Faithful Woman) strikes me as the guiding thread of this collection. What has happened to these women’s stories? What has become of the core of them? The women in Dangerous Women have either been forgotten, like Maria Sibylla Merian, the German naturalist and scientific illustrator, or flattened into stereotype like Jezebel who is remembered as a harlot rather than as a woman remaining true to her native religion. The core of her gone, all that remains are:
her arms, her legs and her head. They wanted it this way, As far as I can tell, So no one would ever be able to say; “This, this was Jesi Belle.”
Bender writes this of Merian in the prose poem “Soft Egg” (archetype, The Independent Woman):
That was what she wanted to show the world—that deep down where things crawled and clambered, there were insides so beautiful, so delicate and bright, that they mirrored the infinite ecology of the human heart.
Here we see the heart again, the core.
I do feel compelled to mention my discomfort with one of Bender’s poem, “The Portrait My Mother Made,” (archetype, The Strongest Woman) dedicated to Mamie Till-Mobley and written in Emmett Till’s ghost-voice. This image troubled me:
Cradled by silt I came out clean as cotton from the gin released
Is that image one the murdered Till would have used? Coming from Chicago as he did and having been raised by a woman who herself left the South as a very young child, it would not likely have been a natural linguistic reference point of his. More importantly, the cotton gin was the invention that solidified chattel slavery in the South by making large-scale cotton production profitable. In a way, it was contributory to Till’s murder. Placing the image of ginned cotton in Emmett Till’s mouth struck me as a questionable choice.
Bender is on more solid ground when she is shining light on historical figures who should be better known such as the naturalist Merian or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican writer, philosopher and Hieronymite nun who is considered the first published feminist in the Americas. I was unfamiliar with both these women, and Bender’s poems inspired me to learn more about them. Dangerous Women is at its best when recovering such stories in Bender’s lyrical language. In the “Tenth Muse” (archetype, The Unmarried Woman) she writes in the voice of de la Cruz:
Who promised you Salvation The sky quells and light vibrates against skin
Women fly and fall in this collection, become or give birth to birds. “Last night, I dreamt / I birthed three dead birds,” Bender writes in “Shalosh” (archetype, The Childless Woman) while in “A Poem For Emily” (archetype, The Quiet Woman) Emily Dickinson is described as a “little red wren.” Ada Lovelace, considered the first computer programmer, imagines herself flying in “The Bird Machine,” one of the collection’s prose pieces (archetype, The Intelligent Woman): “In her mind, when she closed her eyes, she pictured that as she spread her arms and pushed the wings against the air, there would be a trail of exultant leaves in her wake. {gold} “ In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Hélène Cixous writes, “What is interesting is that birds, writing, and many women are considered abominable, threatening, and are rejected.” The repeated appearance of birds and bird imagery in a collection about how women are constructed as dangerous and threatening taps into this deep root, but Bender’s poems reject rejection. They reclaim and retell. They restore the core.
Jesi Bender is an artist from upstate New York. She is the author of the play Kinderkrankenhaus (Sagging Meniscus) and the novel The Book of the Last Word (Whiskey Tit). Her shorter work has appeared in Fence, Split Lip, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other places. http://www.jesibender.com
photo credit: Sarah Tinsley
Dangerous Women by Jesi Bender dancing girl press, 2022 32 pages, $8.00 available here:
Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her poem “Crosswalk” won the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and appeared in Southword. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, San Pedro River Review, and other publications. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland. photo credit: Denise O’Gorman
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her poem “Crosswalk” won the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and appeared in Southword. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, San Pedro River Review, and other publications. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.
Ruth Crossman is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work has appeared in publications including Litro, Flash Fiction, sPARKLE + bLINK, The Fabulist, and Maximum Rock n Roll. Her auto-fiction collection All the Wrong Places was published by Naked Bulb Press in 2022.
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