Smaller Versions, by Katherine D. Perry

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Dylan Thomas says, the “green fuse drives the flower,” and the poems in Katherine D. Perry’s Smaller Versions explore some of the experiences of adolescents, of the “green ages” of girls, growing up in the American South. The free verse, imagistic writing paints scenes of world events from the Vietnam War to the Covid-19 lock downs, revealing the struggles of everyday people trying to survive in a world structured to maintain hierarchies and the status quo. The poems sift through many of the damages and triumphs that those collisions in life leave us with.  While this group of poems is not formally narrative, together they seem to offer a series of feminist voices that imagine what their lives might be like if we could love and live differently, if we didn’t require everyone to lose individuality to find love and belonging.  

Like Perry’s first collection, Long Alabama Summer, the Gulf Coast becomes both a character and a backdrop for coming-of-age portraits, asking readers to rethink the idea that childhood is an age of innocence. Smaller Versions considers the smaller things in life against mammoth backdrops: daffodils in winter, cigarettes at sunrise, or steamed shrimp after a hurricane. How, the writer seems to ask us, do small creatures matter when we consider the size of the universe? What beauty follows from catastrophe?  

Katherine D. Perry is a Professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University where she teaches writing and American Literature. Her first book of poetry, Long Alabama Summer, was released in December of 2017. Some of her recent poems have been published in journals such as InScribe Journal, Last Leaves, Fresh Words, The Coop, and Writers Resist. She is also a co-founder of the Georgia State University Prison Education Project, which brings college courses to incarcerated students in Georgia prisons.  She lives in Decatur, Georgia with her spouse and two children and identifies as a Southern writer, even though she thinks that labels are complicated.  Her website is www.katherinedperry.com.