The Bamboo Wife
Leona Sevick's The Bamboo Wife captures the experiences of an imperfect woman held up against the standard of "good" wife and mother. Sevick is a master of metaphor and imagery, depicting, for example, a mother as a kraken. In the sea creature's words, "It takes a hard-ass woman to raise her young." Every poem is wrought with precise description and emotion. We get nature as well as some location-based poems orienting us in Korea. There is anger and sadness, "the animal need to run in all directions at once," and family trauma both past and present. This trauma is inflicted on the speaker as a child and to some degree perpetuated through her own parenting. The collection asks the reader to provide space in poetry for a woman trying to do her best for her own and others' sake, for one who has "made bad decisions and lived." Every poem is necessary, and Sevick makes each word count. Honesty carries this collection through her speaker's good, bad, and ugly moments. It takes courage for someone to say, "there's no mistake I haven't made."
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"Leona Sevick's The Bamboo Wife is a mesmerizing poetry collection that takes readers on a poignant journey through the intricacies of identity, culture, memory, and love. The title evokes the strange and silent presence of a 'bamboo wife.' This artifact serves as a metaphor for the complexities and nuances of human relationships, and the enduring impact of the past on the present. In a book that 'slices my heart at unexpected times, ' The Bamboo Wife is a compelling and emotionally resonant work."
- January Gill O'Neil, author of Glitter Road
"I was so taken with Leona Sevick's The Bamboo Wife that I read it twice the day I received it, which has only happened to me a few times before. The speaker's unrestrained frankness about the complexities of motherhood and womanhood, self-reliance and self-destruction, and identity, lineage, and tradition remind me of Edna Pontellier's maw-opening observations of her interior landscape in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Sevick's speaker at one point asks the question, 'When do I stop holding / everything I love / like it's broken?' And in another poem, the speaker, defiant and empowered, declares, 'You'd say I can't be / someone else's medicine. // Watch me.' These two emotionally charged and seemingly conflicted critiques of the manner in which one can love and care for others are at the crux of this collection. The Bamboo Wife at its core is a collection about love, love in all of its bewilderingly tender and heartbreaking ruminations."
- Adam Vines, author of Lures and Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review
"Whether it's her brother's scarred, burned hand or her father guarding the hospital room of George Wallace or her Korean heritage, Leona Sevick is haunted by the past. Her poems are intimate, steely in their fierce gaze at the contradictions of this world and herself; and yet she somehow manages to give the people in her poems a depth that makes them unforgettable and very human. The reader trusts this poet's voice, her balanced vision, her willingness to allow for mystery and the untoward. A powerful book."
- David Mura, author of The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself
