Reviewed by L. Lois
Morphology
by Erica Miriam Fabri
Write Bloody Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-949342-66-6, April 2025, 77 pages, $US18
What happens when you meet an ascending poet shortly after their sophomore book was released? You ask to read what they’re currently working on and swoon. Then, you track down their 2025 release — and a review spills out of your snapping fingertips.
When you try to squeeze honey / into the rising steam, you miss — / the sticky golden goo / oozes over the lines / of your palm. / You can lick it off, / or you can throw yourself / into traffic. “When you try to…” (“The Greatest Poem Ever Written”, 19)
So begins Morphology, Erica Miriam Fabri’s 2025 release from Write Bloody Publishing. Consider yourself fashionably late to arrive, while also in the early-bird queue for the poet’s next shooting-star iteration. If you can get a signed copy, now would be a good time to shrink-wrap the time capsule.
I’m not yet finished with our volcano planet; this is / only a day trip…(“Ghost Poem”, 39)
Fabri has an intense style that demands attention, and then turns the gawker towards love, death, poetry, bridges, rats, a child. There are themes, there is ravishing. There is grief. Moonlight and muse. Men who fail and women who confuse. The poet’s pen lingers on lines full of spontaneous turns, unexpected delights in phrasing, metaphors that form out of nowhere and lodge in the reader’s brain. You will also chuckle.
…I have been trying / to find something in this world that feels better / than making love to you, but, instead, I am eating / rattlesnake after rattlesnake. (“How Shadows Are Made”, 29)
Beautifully typeset, each poem demands its page, then releases the reader’s heart to rest in the white spaces. The poems are left-margin traditional, a flow of punctuated sentences carefully capitalized. But there’s insistence in each poem’s title: rounded font in ALL CAPS — politely yelling.
This kind of poetry is candy. You take a bite and you know it’s good. Something to savor all week — a treat to nibble after a hard day. But then the poems intervene, pushing themselves forward. The clock says it will stop waving traffic through, so bedtime can be suspended, just this once. In one sitting, you’ve morphologized through the entire collection, the way the poet knew you would.
…an anthology / of flashbacks strung together like licorice. (“Thirty Days”, 69)
Fabri has a way of locating the yin and yang in a scene. In the person she is remembering, in her expressions of emotion — then she speaks of both parts at once. The desire and the despair; the long game and the short life; the funeral that fell on a birthday. Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is the poet who recognizes irony as the divination rod. Here, words hit the page, then ricochet into the reader, shrapnel stitching heart and brain together, while pushing us to our knees in loving surrender.
…every day ignites / and detonates a cannonball thing inside of me. (“There Are No Tattoos In Heaven”, 36)
Morphology ends with a tribute to motherhood, a poem that flows through the thirty days before a firstborn child arrives from the stars. In this gentle conclusion, Fabri gathers the rough and rumble of everything that came before, grandparents, homes, lovers, great towers that shook and fell — she puts a bow on the bulldozer, calls the story closed, announces a child has been born.
This is the first time my love has no history…(“Thirty Days”, 69)
You pointed me back to me. / I was an ocean away.(“Dear Poetry”, 13)
About the reviewer: L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting into her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, while prioritizing writing, publication, and arts-related volunteerism. Her poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Brussels Review, Washington Square Review, Hanging Loose Magazine, Chiron Review, Poetry Breakfast, among other publications. L. Lois is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets, is part of the editorial team at Quibble Lit, and freelances as a business feature writer and poetry workshop leader. A selection of her published work is linked at https://poeting.my.canva.site.