Graves Too Small to Be Red by Laura Cini English

In these moving poems, Laura English responds to the sort of troubles that we watch on TV or read about in newspapers every day. Aware of the tendency to grow desensitized to omnipresent trauma, she repeatedly bears witness to the way the innocent —often children— suffer at the hands of the powers-that-be. She also emphasizes the way concerned citizens try to help the afflicted. Whether she’s writing about Batman or God, her goal is to draw attention to those good souls who try to find the lost, communicate with the silenced, and mend the broken. This chapbook introduces work by a poet of keen intelligence, ethical sensitivity, and artistic skill that readers should cherish.

–Henry Hart, College of William and Mary

Laura English commands an original voice that provokes us and keeps us off guard, that entices us and makes us shudder. The poems in Graves Too Small to Be Red layer narratives with shadowy statement; they reference fairy tales and the daily news. Above all, the poems are steeped in compassion and outrage for English’s subject, the deaths of children, drilling down to the darkest core of human experience. “Isn’t it red, this madness we feel when the hour is ours/but with many letters to answer?” the poet writes. English is brave, and her language is as lovely as it is terrifying.

–Lynn Levin, author of Miss Plastique