In her poem “Nocturne,” Carolyn Hembree’s final couplet reads “I’ll have my drink. What’s got my get may get me too. / Play dead, each day a shallow sucking wound,” which comes after a serious contemplation of food preparation (“Why do gods make us eat?”) while the speaker's daughter makes a gun from bread, playing with her food, mixing themes of child care and motherhood, loss, playfulness, fullness, and Louisiana in a way that, in just these two lines that muse on a potential death that may “get” the speaker, a pretend death at the behest of the speaker’s daughter, and the reality of a daily wound, has the potential to neatly represent Carolyn Hembree’s newest collection, For Today.

But how could you neatly summarize a book like this?

For Today, Carolyn Hembree’s latest collection (available now from LSU Press), is an opera of grief and delight, a rumination on language and writing. In this collection, Hembree shows us what it looks like to parent after losing a parent, while also describing the precarious nature of being alive, not just in a city like New Orleans, where much of this book is set, but in the general sense of the word living. These poems are very much alive and tell us what that means through her use of forms and language.

In “Some Measures,” Hembree’s use of the sonnet crown helps to get a sense of that daily loss of the speaker’s father, the end line of one sonnet repeating at the beginning of the next sonnet, forming a chain of evolving moments in her speaker’s grieving process. “La Dictée” is a villanelle about writing and her mother, about learning a language from listening to others, and then writing that language down as a writer in the strict form of the villanelle. It’s her speaker’s way to say: I’m listening! I’m writing! I’m “getting it down,” as she says in the poem, no matter what the cost.

There’s her two fantasias at the end of second section, which seem to break form entirely and offer us pure, unmitigated forms of pleasure, Hembree showing off all of her poetic powers in these stunning movements, even admitting to herself in “Dizzy Birds Fantasia:” “yet I too have been controlled through pleasure.”

The title poem, though, is really the star of the show. “For Today” takes us through a day in the speaker’s life, traveling with her as she walks about town, remembering certain places, dates, events, walking with her daughter, cataloging words, and doing that kind of living that she’s been reflecting on and refracting through the other poems in this collection. The poem’s use of form serves to take us through these different channels of the speaker’s mind, progressing in a way that doesn’t feel hurried and allows us to linger where she lingers and take those mental and physical journeys that she takes. There’s a realization in this poem that all there is is the moment before us, that all we have is the day before us, making this title, For Today, something of an ode to what (and who) is around the speaker.

I can also read it as something to live for, in this area of the country that is slowly decaying, every day another tragedy, another mile of coast line lost to the sea. This collection is realistic in its portrayal of relationships and events, yet optimistic in a way that I sometimes feel I am missing amidst the realism, and Carolyn Hembree is showing us the way.

For Today by Carolyn Hembree, LSU Press, 19.95.

Parker Logan is originally from Orlando, Florida. He currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and the Yalobusha Review. He is a reader for ONLY POEMS.He currently works as a teen library tech in the EBR Public Library System, where he is working hard to expose the youth to poetry... just don't tell the governor that.