My Growing Collection, by Scarlett Svoboda

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Personhood has always been undefinable, a grasp at both the concrete and incorporeal concepts behind one’s soul. Seemingly, for a teenager: impossible to parse through. In My Growing Collection, Scarlett Svoboda attempts to craft an idea of her own identity through bouncing rhymes about bounding jack rabbits and reflective dialogues with mysterious deities.

It stands to reason that this chapbook has no all encompassing conclusion or grand realization. Rather, it is an exploration of life through sixteen poems, from a transforming perspective over the course of many years. My Growing Collection jumps between stark moments of loss and profound friendship in pursuit of self-understanding. In contemplation of forgetting her own childhood memories, Svoboda grasps for any item to add to her personhood as life begins: a glass model boat, an ancient rib, a warm bed, even centipedes. These poems arise from experience in a growing body of flesh, uncertain of her final form.

Svoboda’s chapbook is whimsical and daunting; readers will find themselves thrown from their childhood bed toward the open ocean and pushed face-to-face with their own collections. It is certain, from the leaves they pick on the walk home, the memories they store, the family heirlooms they keep, and the friends they adore, that there is much to learn.

Scarlett Svoboda is an emerging author from Portland, OR. She is studying English Literature and Studio Art at The College of Wooster. Svoboda is an alumnus of the Fir Acres Writing Workshop 2022 at Lewis & Clark College. Her fiction and poetry feature in the Literary Arts 2023-24 WITS Student Anthology, the 2025 GOLIARD Literary Magazine, and The Wooster Voice Newspaper. While she is not dancing, writing, or growing, she edits for the Voice Creative section.