I have to love a librarian poet, especially when her book is a gift from my son, but Alison Rollins's poems are also staggeringly good. ( )

This first collection from librarian Alison C. Rollins contains a variety of poems, many of which meditate on what it means to be a Black woman in America, sexuality, abortion, and grief. The language of libraries - and, in the case of the final poem, "Object Permanence", punctuation - become metaphors for all sorts of human experience.

I struggle a lot with symbolism and metaphorical language in poetry, so I'd guess I understood about half of the poems, and could probably get more out of it on a slower reread after finishing a poem (it took me awhile, but I finally did wrap my hand around "Object Permanence" for example). So my favorite poems were the more direct ones, such as "Self-Portrait of Librarian with T.S. Eliot's Papers" to which I could understand allusions to archival practices and Eliot's own poetry, and which ends with the arresting lines "only those who are forgotten go undisturbed, only things / kept in the dark know the true weight of light." I also really enjoyed "A Valid Archive" which is a MARC record of a book that really exists, though a real cataloger may notice more details than I did. I would read more of her collections. Perhaps its not that surprising that, as a librarian, these were the ones that stood out to me in a collection that shows a wide variety of styles and topics. ( )

Library of Small Catastrophes from Alison C Rollins is the type of debut collection that both satisfies and makes me look to future volumes.

The satisfaction derives from how the poems work to paint pictures I can gaze at for hours and keep finding new colors. Each reading of each poem gave me some new nuance with which to understand the narrator, or the situation, or both. I also discovered new ways to better understand the world around me and the various people with whom I share it. And I hope I learned some new things about myself, my capacity for empathy and for making different connections than I have before.

That is a lot to get from a short collection of poetry. Yet there you have it. Until the next volume from Rollins, I will continue to read and think about this one.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss. ( )