A Flower Burst Open
Autumn Newman
Finishing Line Press January 2025

A Flower Burst Open is a chapbook by Autumn Newman. The book is an unflinchingly honest story of surviving domestic violence. By using the myth of Persephone, the poet reimagines reality, creating a universal narrative for every victim and, in the process, turning the victims into thriving women. This is a short chapbook with many concise poems. Annie Finch says that Autumn’s “poem’s form is awake and aware in every syllable, so that form and meaning prove as inseparable as a face and its expression.” Annie called this collection full of “Ingenious poetic structures, exquisitely calibrated meters, and searingly apt imagery.”

Autumn is a mistress of meter. It is quite extraordinary the way she employs an array of meters, including sapphics, in her poetry. Anyone who has attempted to write in meter knows that it is not an easy feat.

And her imagery is simply breathtaking.

A woman suffering.

“Dozens of / black birds flew out of my mouth and into the sky,/ But you struck me so hard, that I put them all back.”

“My eyes assault the room. The tub is harder than bone.”

“Choose a room with a window/ Women have been known to fly in desperate/ circumstances.”

And once the woman has reclaimed her body and mind,

“Now I rise, resplendent in blood-red garnets/ showering hellfire.”

And finally, the sisterhood of the survivors, “We weave up and down and across. So Close/ we are one bird trilling the sky.

What stunning imagery, and all expressed in metrical precision.

I hope, dear readers, that you are inspired to read this little gem. You would be poetically and spiritually richer for it.