PRAISE:
Fissures presents a startling sequence of poems where fractures become nurturing grounds. The collection’s compelling opening image – a knotted necklace – reveals a voice that is vulnerable yet undeterred, brimming with fresh desire. It is from this very tangle of constriction, confusion, strength, and weakness that the poems in this collection surge. Within these pages, the broken is often painstakingly rendered whole; the poet remains anchored to the crack and the gushing spring alike. Even an “unloved braided rug” becomes a site for revitalization. Birds reappear throughout the collection like threads weaving the fissures together, creating nests of possibilities. As the poet intones, “…we are all just nested morsels, begging for flight…”
–Andrew Morris, author
Open to any poem in Allison Collins’s Fissures, and be caught in taut, springy, sensuous, earthy and ethereal lines: “Last night, last night I, too, felt fat /with promise, wreathed in pearls,/crowned in something celestial,/ fanciful, and drunk on light. (“Rain after Moon”). Look up and find an eagle “looping and loping through/its overturned teacup of sky” for a woman/ obsessed with flight,/ with the wonder of such a small-brained thing/ knowing at once where it will land/ and how best to flee. (“Fleeing”).” Stay or flee, accept or escape: these are cruxes where the poet finds herself in creatures wild for freedom, but home- and duty-bound, as when “seagulls turn cloud-borne cartwheels and I think,/we are all just nested morsels, begging for flight” (“Metronomes”).” Or wondering “what it might be like/to be less needed,/to not feel the sharp-beaked call/of all of you, wanting, wanting,” her quandary mirrored in the bird caught in the woodstove, “a thing/that had, really, trapped itself” (“Starling”).” Or to give herself, or not, to loves present and past and never, in poems as sexy and bold as Olds and tormented as Plath, but all Allison Collins. This rapturous debut collection strikes the final pose of finding a hatchling bird, “all new-freckled feathers and bald belly,” that she would pulverize worms for: “I thought, this,/ this I can fix. /This, I can save. (“Fissures”).” Try. Try these poems on. See how well they fit. They’re made to last. To be saved.
–Robert Bensen, author of What Lightning Spoke
Allison Collins’ Fissures is visceral and gorgeous. These poems alchemize desire, loss, motherhood, and our universal ache for freedom. A murmuration of devastations — we are left elevated having read her.
–Vicki Whicker, author of Caught Before Flight
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