Until the Spring-Summer 2025 issue, Rat’s Ass Review has been a review in name only. It has published hundreds of poems, many of them quite good, but it has never attempted to offer an assessment of a body of work.
Now approaching its fifteenth birthday, RAR is belatedly celebrating a sort of literary bar mitzvah as it announces: “Today I am a Review.”
How fitting that the voice is that of founding editor David M. Harris, who returns to consider the latest work of poet Annette Sisson.
David M. Harris reviews poet Annette Sisson’s new work: Winter Sharp With Apples
It has been, for a while, a commonplace that poetry collections should have themes, as though respectable poets devote themselves to one issue at a time, and nothing else. And there are plenty of quite good poets who do just that, writing fifty or a hundred poems in a row, all exploring a single question or story.
But this is a recent development, and simply does not apply to poets who, like Annette Sisson, have some themes to which they return, but by which they are not obsessed. Sisson’s latest book, Winter Sharp With Apples (from Terrapin Books), turns often to images and ideas about nature and our place in it, but it also shows us a wide-ranging mind at work.
One of the important factors that holds the collection together is Sisson’s radical honesty. Her frank voice and open relationship with her readers hold our attention and allow us – even urge us – to step beyond the most easily accessible level of her poetry and dig for more, knowing that the digging will be profitable.
Of course, honesty has been, for the last century or so, one of the factors we expect from poetry with ambition to be more than self-expression. Self-expression is fine for beginning poets, but it is only a beginning; good poets tie what they have learned about themselves to what we can learn from them about ourselves. Honesty includes the self-knowledge that your relationship with your mother is of no interest to us unless it illuminates our relationships with our mothers.
And that is where Sisson shines. A poem such as “Clutch,” for example, looks at her relationship with her mother without complaining (empathy, after all, is part of radical honesty) and finally acknowledging that holding on is a necessary prequel to letting go. Both parents of adult children and the children themselves can feel the truth of this. Sisson consistently draws us into experiences from her life and expands them to encompass the lives of her readers as well.
Nearly all the poems in Winter Sharp With Apples do come from her own experiences. Sisson invites us into her life, in part as an example of what can be done with memory, observation, and imaginative consideration. Observation and imagination lead us to vivid and meaningful imagery, with lines like “We lug our stunted childhoods//like rusted spikes” (from “Muscle Memory’) or “trophies – coins//to feed the machine of his parents’ need” (from “Galloping in Darkness”) that provide worlds of context in a few words. We see, or we remember by analogy, much of how these families work, and we can share in the author’s finding ways out of those dilemmas.
Perhaps Sisson’s life has not been extraordinary, the making of a hit film. She has seen some things that most of us have not, but that is not in itself exceptional. Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson (in “A Scandal in Bohemia”) “You see but you do not observe.” Sisson observes. She pays attention and, like Holmes, extracts meaning where others might not notice it. Add to that her considerable gift for conveying that meaning, and we have a book that is itself a considerable gift for her readers.
Editor’s Note: You can find a sample of Ms. Sisson’s work, the poem What the Scan Doesn’t Show, here in our Spring-Summer 2022 Issue./RGB
Reviewers’ Bios:
Before his current exile in Tennessee, New Yorker David M. Harris‘s first career was in book publishing, as an editor, agent, and copyeditor. He also worked for a while in film production before getting his MFA and starting a career teaching college English. His poetry has appeared in various journals. His first collection of poetry, The Review Mirror, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2013. He is also the author of Democracy and Other Problems, an essay collection; Bill, the Galactic Hero: the Final Incoherent Adventure (a novel with Harry Harrison); numerous magazine articles; several published short stories; and two produced screenplays.