Reviewed by Julianne Di Nenna
Forever Mistaken for Ourselves
by Jenny Grassl
Tupelo Press
Paperback, ISBN: 9781961209718, December 2026
They should have called Jenny Grassl to present her poetry collection when Senators Marsha BlackBurn and Ted Cruz asked Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to define a woman during her nomination hearing. Grassl’s mystic collection, Forever Mistaken for Ourselves, would have mesmerized the entire Senate. While Grassl doesn’t define women (who can), her collection captures the essence of women’s spiritual and metaphysical being. She portrays women as part druid, animal, spirit, land and water, in short, women full of desire, capability, and knowledge. The collection presents women in their endless poetic variety of roles, shapes, sizes, forms, connections.
Grassl seamlessly connects to women’s experiences: “knife shucks open/ woman I could be”. Poems move from what was, what is, to what could be, to higher spiritual callings. They feel transcendental and necromantic: “I am a sea of castaways/ a flotsam of outfits to hold a day’s skin”.
Her poems interchange between several levels, from “my song summons hounds of heaven” to “tiny pearl to steer by”. Readers can easily lose themselves among the spirits as Grassl’s collection evokes eco-feminism along spiritual and metaphysical realms. Each poem reads like an awakening, “a mermaid prone”.
The collection is divided into four parts. Each part intersperses the four elements of the earth (earth, air, water, fire); animal kingdom; fauna and flora, and physical-metaphysical: “… you and the Earth — old sparks from bork-child rock”. At the same time, each part focuses specifically on one of those themes. The collection thus follows the life cycle of birth and childhood, adolescence/adulthood, aging, and death. This intertwining that Grassl uses forces readers to consider categorizations of nature and physical being, thus to examine the exterior world as we have come to see it through education or social conditioning. Ecofeminism evoked in the collection equally challenges readers to think about how we have been socialized according to masculine view points and patriarchy:
“maybe we’ve got it wrong/ postponing fire/ dowsing/ the stone/ of earth/ for whitewater/ whelping green and breathe…. the maternal one easily got gravity/rocks a-whirl in what was wet/alive/and we/who did stanch/ the animal in our iron-rich hearts/ before rust/ before slag/ and crucible/ vanish into the serene void of the father.”
Grassl’s poems conjure what we have lost and continue to lose in the world when we don’t pay attention to the spiritual and animal world. ‘Last Blush of My Chapped Planet’ depicts the earth as “it rattled in my custody…. no museums to hold the early deaths…. no rivers opening mouths of caves…. just a bauble made of unfamiliars/ a lost kingdom of mine”.
Just as air fills space between us and forever remains invisible and changing, Grassl uses space in her poetry to mimic distance and change but also the spiritual.
why do I not join the shrug or joke
escape myself Melpomene’s downside
the next generation wakes
diaper in the pail kiss on the cheek
The dual usage of space in her collection challenges readers to consider the types of choices women are faced with in life and to ponder if women have any freedom of choice at all. “the centuries’ fathers will not rest/ only wander/ among outcomes/ this year all the women are wearing/ native plants” and “jackstraw arrows fly at my/ cry-alive/ and God/ says Praise me”. The form also evokes the fleeting and ephemeral.
While Grassl places women’s being in physical, spiritual, and metaphysical worlds, drawing on metaphysical metaphors, the poems are also very intellectual, speculative, and experimental, providing a meditative quality for readers. “I don’t wish to kill/ just hold and feel/ flight/ a grasp at feathers”.
Grassl’s collection feels timeless. These poems might have been written at any point of history but they come to us now, requesting us to contemplate how we view ourselves and the world around us. The collection challenges us to examine the ‘elements’ which have affected and shaped our own lives. Grassl offers us these pomes now, at a point in history continually caught up in conflict, where we go backwards in time in terms of women’s positioning in society and rights, and where we find ourselves distracted by technological advances and surrounded by bad news. They remind us to think about the persons we are at the core, what is important to us, where we have been, and where we are going.
These 44 poems stay with you after each turn of the page, long after you close the book. A profound, provocative, and tantalizing collection without doubt.
About the reviewer: Juliana Di Nenna is a world traveler and author of Girl in Tulips. She is a humanitarian aid worker and has worked on four different continents in over 30 countries. She was a finalist for the Harbor Editions Marginalia series, a semi-finalist for the Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books, and winner of several poetry prizes.