The Brink of Silence, by Adele Evershed

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Brink of Silence is a collection of poems composed of unapologetically honest moments that touch on love, loss, heartbreak, healing, change, and self-acceptance.

Some of the poems in the collection evoke women's changing relationships to their bodies, reflecting on society's expectations for women and the challenges that aging brings in a culture obsessed with youth. The poem "The Gaze As She Leaves the Country Club's Annual Cocktail Party" deals with this directly: the narrator "misplaces" her orgasm, an image that is both playful and knowing; the speaker is confronting the knowledge that she is losing her sexual currency as she grows older. Similarly, in "#SomethingFishyGoingOn," the poem brings attention to the near-invisibility of cultural conversations around menopause.

Other poems deal with bereavement, mourning, and how that grief changes and evolves over time. The poem "Threads" is autobiographical, dealing with the death of the poet's mother and her realization that "she had left me just enough / to remember / but not enough to know." In "Crosses and Other Hard to Bear Things," the poet ponders her own mortality and the difficult question of how we would like to leave the world.

Ultimately, the poems invite readers to reflect on their own experiences of aging, grief, and loss, hopefully making the conversations around these complex issues a little less silent.

Adele Evershed was born in South Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. Her prose and poetry have been published in over a hundred journals and anthologies such as Every Day Fiction, Grey Sparrow Journal, High Shelf, Reflex Fiction, Shot Glass Journal, and Hole in the Head Review. Adele has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for poetry, and the Staunch Prize for flash fiction. Finishing Line Press will publish her poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places this year and her novella-in-flash, Wannabe, was published by Alien Buddha Press in May.