Zeena / Zenobia Speaks by Kelly R. Samuels

Kelly R. Samuels‘s Zeena / Zenobia Speaks engages in the essential lyric task of giving voice to the voiceless. In these poems, the taciturn meets the turn of well-wrought lines that wring meaning from the quiet sufferings of Wharton’s iconic character. Wharton’s Zeena emerges in complexity and depth, her suppressed cry released and shaped in poems of potent imagery and clipped syntax that “can manage the weight of snow” and the “threat of fire.”

–Luke Brekke is a member of New England Review’s editorial panel. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.