How to Make an Espresso Martini, by Eileen Toomey

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The collection begins with a recipe: 1 shot of Ketel One, Mr. Black’s Coffee Liqueur and the ghost of Eileen Toomey’s father sitting at the end of the bar. We meet her fierce and funny mother, her loving Gram, meanwhile the methane bubbles from stockyard waste ooze into Bubbly Creek. When she holds her nose, her mother pushes her hand away. “Stop it,” she says. “That’s just the smell of a hard day’s work.” We travel from Canaryville in Chicago into the long emergency of a husband’s cancer diagnosis and the hard-won happiness on the other side of it.

Structured around the three coffee beans dropped into an espresso martini (Health, Wealth, Happiness), this debut chapbook is part haibun, part ghazal, pantoum and prose poem, retaining its working-class ethos and humor throughout. This collection moves between forms the way memory moves between years.

Toomey writes from inside the body — painting a room at dawn while her husband sleeps upstairs, riding a boat on Lake Superior in the aftermath of immunotherapy, sitting on a lifeguard stand with an empty nip of Jim Beam Apple. Her poems know that grief and joy are not opposites but neighbors, and that the only honest way to write about love is to put it in the same sentence as fear. How to Make an Espresso Martini is a debut that arrives fully formed — clear-eyed and large-hearted.

Eileen Toomey has been published in The Rumpus, Flash the Court, Contemporary Haibun Online, and other literary magazines. Her poem “Immunotherapy/American Ghazal” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net after winning second place in Cleaver Magazine’s Form and Form-Breaking contest, judged by Diane Seuss. Eileen is a submission coach at Project Write Now, a non-profit writing organization, in Red Bank, NJ.