Reviwed by Natalie Marino

The Places We Empty has an intimate and quiet style. Throughout the work, the author shows her power as a poet in the beautiful imagery used to describe events in her life that have caused personal pain. Her poems also channel societal suffering about issues that continue to plague us all, such as rape, miscarriage, homophobia, and climate change.

The poem "The Bicycle" uses the universally known encounter with an abandoned bicycle as an extended metaphor for the less tangible pain of miscarriage.  It opens with a vivid description of the abandoned bicycle:

There it lay, red and glistening, abandoned
in the middle of the plaza, flipped
sideways as if in a fit of rage or despair, 

wheels spinning madly under the wind's 
nimble fingers. The bicycle belonged
to a child

Later in the poem we learn that the subject of the poem has suffered a miscarriage: "After the ache, / the blood, after she knew he had left / her body and curled up into the universe." She also wants to solve an unsolvable problem by erasing her memory: "She had wanted to soak her memory to a blur." The end of the poem has grating consonant sounds that frame the realization that the pain of miscarriage will never go away:

The bicycle was wet to the touch, slippery
as vernix, cold as a corpse. When she was sure
no one was looking, she picked it up, took it home.

"The Bicycle" is an excellent example of poetry's ability to work through almost unsurvivable pain by elevating a universal image.

The vulnerability portrayed throughout this collection is perhaps one of its greatest strengths. Most of its poems describe deeply personal and painful events. "Poem of My Life" shows the closeness between the author and her lover, perhaps made stronger because of the fear of personal trauma that they both have been forced to endure. There is also perhaps the implication that they both have experienced physical violence because of their often-homophobic world:

What we found
and all that we lost along the way:
the loved ones who stopped loving us,

the lies we hissed through gritted teeth
in order to land jobs, or keep them.
The slurs spelled out in spray paint 

on our front door, the stones that shattered
windows, the sticks that broke bones. 
We weathered all the storms together.

The author is justified to feel anger, but the ending of this poem reveals not really anger about being forced to weather the storms of prejudice together, but the intense sadness that the author feels after a life lived fighting for the right to live and love: "I needed to set // these words to paper, let the ink weep / for a spell."

The poem "The Places We Empty," which shares the book's title, describes the hot rage the author feels about an unfair world. In a way, it is the culmination of the growing intensity of emotion seen in the earlier poems in this book. It seems to end with a warning that just as personal rage can empty a person's heart, collective rage can cause a society to become empty as well, to become morally bankrupt. The poem opens by describing the author's rage that she knows is so strong that it has the power to destroy her surrounding environment:

There are so many things I could say right now.
The expletives would fly off my words if I opened my mouth,

released them. The daffodils know. Their colors have paled under
my glower. Their petals have curled and rocked like a child

crestfallen after a scolding. They cower as I approach with pruning
shears. It's not fair, but I need to clip something.

I could fill the sky with flocks of words 

By the end of the poem the author shows her need to channel her voice into something useful as well as her fear that her rage may stamp out everything, even her voice: "I could perch on the edge of my dignity, singing until she retreated. / In every burst of silence we die a thousand deaths. In silence // I hobble around our garden, searching for my voice among petals / and leaves, for all my voices longing to echo across the sky." If the author and the world as a whole are to survive, rage must be reconciled. It must be channeled into a clear path towards the future.  

The last poem in this collection is "Thanataphobia," which refers to anxiety about death. This poem navigates the natural fear of death and the fruitlessness of continued and perseverated anxiety about it: 

what if the mystical white glow is a hallucination
and there are no spirits wavering on the other side?
It's useless, really, this obsession for surmising
the circumstances of my own demise. 

An owl could come crashing through my window, scratch off my
scalp as I'm composing this poem. I could slip off a rocky
mountain path, plunge into the river below, be swept under the
current. 

I could be assaulted late at night as I toss
paper and plastic into their corresponding bins, drown
in a puddle of moonlight. 

This world can be a terrible place, and the author has shown us she knows this intimately with her deeply personal poetry. But the author argues that there is still a lot of love and beauty in this world as well, with her often beautiful imagery and her descriptions of the affection she has for her partner. She hopes that she and the world can choose the path towards compassion, but she is not quite sure this is possible, as she asserts in the last stanza of "Thanataphobia:" "In the meantime, how shall I rid my dreams / of the interminable darkness, the earth's ready rotation, / the years floating by in the. Millions like cosmic dust." The author seems to be saying that when a person has experienced trauma, it is possible for her to succumb to rage and fear and suffer constant anxiety about the end—but if the loveliness of the world is to be preserved, we must all walk towards love.