Her Hair Plays With Fire by Mary M. Sesso

These deceptively laconic poems combine the cool diagnostic eye of a veteran nurse-practitioner with unexpected connections to the mysterious pulse of an enveloping natural world and the grief, loss, and risks that smolder beneath each day’s surfaces. In the title poem, for example, the speaker watches her mother brush out her beautiful hair, “sparks flying,” before coiling it back in a monochromatic bun because “it takes time for a girl to learn/ . . .colors can alert suspicious eyes.” In “What We Didn’t Know,” perhaps this collection’s strongest poem, the aftermath of a suicide is casually captured: “What we didn’t see/was the suitcase . . .of empty vodka bottles/. . .under a bed/or [practice] holes in the ceiling/made by the rusty revolver/stashed under a pillow/biding its time until/we kissed her goodbye . . .” All in all, a suite whose echoes keep unfolding.
–Michael H. Levin, author, Man Overboard (Poems, 2018), Falcons (Poems, 2020), A Border Town in Poland (nonfiction, 2021), Firebird (nonfiction, forthcoming 2022)

Mary Sesso’s work packs a punch of both wisdom and emotion. She has lived life well enough to evaluate her memories with intelligence, but she is anything but passionless. In her adept short poems, she gives the reader a satisfying mix of wit and feeling; her past life as a nurse shows in these works—the precision of a skilled practitioner. I cannot recommend her poetry highly enough.

–Donald Illich