Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Barefoot Poetess
By Paris Rosemont
Dirt Lane Press (Westwords)
April 2025, ISBN: 9781923044456, Paperback, $28
Paris Rosemont’s debut 2024 collection, Banana Girl, burst into the poetry scene with a fresh voice that challenged readers to re-imagine poetic formality, language, and tradition. Her new book, Barefoot Poetess, takes a similar approach to confession and the poetic form, with fifty poems in a wide range of styles from Haibun to Sonnet, Abecedarian odes, concrete poems, reverse poems, poetic “mixtapes”, Cento, Shakespearean sonnets, and prose poems. The distinctive burlesque of Banana Girl is still evident in Barefoot Poetess though a bit tamped against the intensity of some of the book’s subject matter which engages with notions of “play” in positive and negative ways. Words play across the pages, often moving in non-linear ways and sensual ways, evoking taste, touch, sound in sonically focused arrangements. Play is joyful but it can also be a euphemism for abuse, as well as a kind of theatre that reclaims power to the disenfranchised. Some of the poems, most notably the title poem, have a purple quality: the language is elevated and even Shakespearean at times, but against this backdrop of play, the richness works, giving the work a performative and even, at times, fun quality.
The book opens with the heart-wrenching “Mama’s flown away with the mockingbirds”, a poem of dissociation and loss against a backdrop of motherhood and its ministrations:
I pity these wretched orphans. Imagine
how unsettling it must feel to be sung
to sleep by a ghost who knows
their favourite lullabies and looks so
like someone they once knew.
This combination of a person who is both absent and present is a recurring theme through the book, referencing the pain of birth and the exhaustion of breastfeeding. In spite of these struggles, this ghost continues to sing her children to sleep, and to feed her child. There is a sense that, in motherhood, the giving doesn’t end with depression or even death, and though the kids “know”, they are also still receiving care. This poem introduces us to a recurring antagonist, a decidedly male character who “harvests” the apples of youth, constantly taking. Often the antagonist takes the form of the ex-husband who shows no sympathy for the death of orphaned newborn bunnies or even a stillbirth:
I guess that should have prepared me for when I lost our child in the womb a couple of years later. Chastising my tears on Mother’s Day, he said but you weren’t even a mother yet. (“Kill the Wabbits”)
This is also the malevolent giant of “Foot and spouse disease”, with its reference to Jack and the Beanstalk:
He was larger than life, this man. A figure looming colossal. Not as a Heracles might, but as a giant, casting shadows and fear. His tree-trunk legs would tender down the hall and I would keep quiet as a mouse, hoping he would forget I was there. But he would sniff me out, grind my bones.
Later, we see the same shadow in the Simon of “Simon Says” who makes a game with a child into something ominous and painful: “I do all the things Simon says”.
The masculine lack of empathy presented here contrasts with the feminine which is aligned to the natural world – amorphous, beautiful, and inexplicable, an expansiveness rooted in the beauty of language and fluid motion:
Instead, you were jelly-limned, silvery
strands framing your coralline
beam. (“Creatures of the Deep)
This is where transformation occurs, in this gentler love which aligns with the notion of the poetic muse. It’s mother earth, the ocean, humans becoming mermaids or fish: “a new silver-spleen goddess.” Even a cactus embodies this fluidity: “Perhaps love can nest within me yet” (“We are Saguaro”).
Another theme that recurs through the book is migration and identity, utilising poetic tools to explore displacement, the way identity is often externally imposed, and that peculiar sense of disembodiment that comes with the immigrant experience. This theme is particularly apparent in two poems about the father. “The Colombo Plan” begins with the father and ends with the daughter in a cycle of trauma, self-loathing and shame:
But for all the deals my parents had to make
with pasty foreign devils in crisp white-
collared suits to buy me
a life they never had, still —
(ungrateful bitch that I am)
I was not alright.
Not then.
Not now.
Not even close.
The father returns later in “Pirates of the Andaman”, and we find out about his Polio, his harried migration, other “back-alley stories” and a legacy of fear that asserts itself throughout the book in the spouse and other masculine antagonists, creating a story that connects all of the poems.
Many of the poems lean into the poetic process itself, using irony and humour to explore notions of power and performance through language. Humour is evident throughout the book but particularly so in the “doppelgänger dildo” suite which explores what it means to be a creative person over a series of poems in the shape of a fancy teacup, through poetry exercises, and risqué performances that evokes the burlesque personae Rosemont has cultivated so well:
i am performing the hum of escape to a live backing track: rhythmic pulsation of my doppelgänger on a pleasing mode 6, speed 4 (not my setting for private purposes with my non-stunt double). It goes down *badum* *tish* a treat. I like the audiences gasps of is that…? Is she really…? before they whip out their phones so they can show it to their friends later. (“(iii) shooting stars”)
This form of confessional is pure theatre, with the shock driven by the audience’s perceptions or a writing teacher’s prudishness. The mingling of the vulnerable and self-deprecation with an “astronomical” reclamation of the self is a balancing act that Rosemont manages well. This creativity extends outwards into the ekphrastic, with poems inspired by paintings, a wide range of music, and other pieces of writing including Ted Hughes’ “The Relic” and Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant” who are kept side-by-side in the book. These two poems seem to be in conversation with one another picking up the rhythms and subject matter of their references, including the slant rhymes of Plath in “Christmas Eve Shopping List”:
But in twenty-five days I’ll have a sleeve,
in Fifty, a wetsuit dripping
like a second skin. A living
canvas, everywhere you look.
There are poems that make confessions and then utilise the confession as a form of play. There are sexual peccadilloes, secret love affairs, hotel consumable theft: “Can’t leave behind anything that’s not bolted down.” (“Hotel Hoarder”), and poetic envy: “I scowl and burn and simmer, skulk back to my place in the communal dining hall of society.” (“I’m too dumb for poetry”). Unusually, the book ends with the title poem which pulls the many threads of the book together into a poem that is humorously grandiose while still maintaining humility – something of a signature for Rosemont:
When you hear
the susurrus of verdant fronds, my darling, may cheer-
leader pom poms will quiver your name.
I will give you this poem — and many more.
I will plant my roots in you and call you home.
Barefoot Poetess does a terrific job of straddling the gap between performative and confessional. Rosemont is a distinctive and powerful voice in modern poetry and her work continues to feel fresh and exciting.