Cover Image: The Year of the Femme

The Year of the Femme

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Thoroughly enjoyed Donish's poems here, especially the manner in which she challenges the notion of sexuality — but also the fragile nature of relations between men and women. I love how her verses carry on novel-like, endlessly and uninterrupted. Beautiful.

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The Year of The Femme (2019) is a mindful and reflective collection of poetry that evokes and celebrates the feminine spirit. The poet, Cassie Donish is the recipient of the Iowa Poetry prize (2018) and this is her second collection following her poetry debut: Beautyberry (2018). Some of the poems contained in "Femme" have been previously published.

The memory of “open water” and “open sky” are reoccurring themes with earth, air, shoreline beaches, with many other natural elements and nature. There are several themes of observation and situations revealed in free style and alternative verse. “The Tower” is a powerful and alarming piece that may suggest an accident or suicide? An unnamed individual is found at the bottom of the ocean, Donish writes of “twisting herself into a blue/green rope”—a rope which was thrown down to save this person who was “willed” to climb up and implored to “please recover”. Haunted by image endings: “I repeat myself over and over/when time stops, each cell in my body will unlock/Each cell contains the same image: a face/The mount gapes open, but there is no sound. Nothing to defend.”
Without actually saying so, there seemed to be a thread of anxiety or mental anguish, lack of memory that occurred both before and after “The Tower” as well as the likelihood of psychiatric hospitalization: hospital technical staff, the waiting room, the largest hospital in an unnamed state. There was no mention of injury, accident; illness etc.
Attraction and desire take flight in several poems with only slight hints at lesbian love and physical lovemaking. We don’t really have enough details to fully understand “she” or unnamed events as Donish reveals a “mystery of thought” (and observation). Regarding her lover, Donish beckons her to follow her into Oregon, Washington and California.

“The Year of The Femme” was the closing poem beginning with swimming on a slow moving river, which turns into a meditative journey of awareness surrounded by the sheer force of the sea. Driftwood and sand dollars are perhaps symbolic of a gentle way of life enjoyed fully with her lover. “I’m in a neighborhood of mirrors, adolescent flowers, and the sound of footsteps. The question is how to travel, to cross to you.” In the spring, life begins fresh and anew in this thoroughly captivating collection of discovery, love and acceptance. ** With appreciation to the University of Iowa Press via NetGalley for providing a DDC for the purpose of review.

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Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Cassie Donish’s (@CassieDonish) collection The Year of the Femme includes long, vivid poems that feel like wandering down a forest path surrounded by a gentle, crisp breeze and the smell of change in the air. Queerness abounds and I felt as though Donish was in my own head pondering desire, sexuality, gender, autonomy, loneliness, and hope. Each poem stands alone in its self-reflection and sincerity and yet the whole is woven together seamlessly. This is a collection that captures the thoughts and emotions of new as well as worn love, our explorations of the body and embodiment, and the questions we leave unanswered.

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The Year of the Femme was filled with poetry centered around feminism and the body. It’s raw and honest. Both topics are important in today’s life and needs to be dissected for a broader perspective. With that said, I struggled to get into all the poems. Some were deep and meaningful, while others didn’t possess any spark. Some of the poems were overshadowing others, like they were added just to make the collection more complete.

Even though I couldn’t relate to all the poems, I’m sure a lot of people will adore this collection. It has a lot of angles and aspects which are relatable.

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While I’m not a poetry expert, I found this one hard to get into. I really wanted to love it but felt it fell short.

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The Year of the Femme is a 2018 Iowa Poetry Prize winner. The reader shouldn’t blast through the collection. It’s obvious that Donish chose each and every word carefully. The result of doing so are stunning images throughout the collection. Even if you don’t particularly like poetry, but love words and their use, you should read this collection.

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The Year of the Femme is filled with witty, engaging poems. While not all are successful, I fully expect that the eponymous poem The Year of the Femme will be an award-winner.

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The Year of the Femme is exactly what I like about contemporary poetry. It’s just so damn pleasant to read. It starts out with a 20-page poem, “Portrait of a Woman, Mid-Fall”, which I absolutely loved. Donish’s language is skilful in these two stanzas:

“At the edge of a field a feeling of arrival awaits
Arrival is not a rival of departure
The two have to work together to make anything happen

All the clocks move together through time
In a flock of birds, some birds are a little behind
All the birds are held together by a principle of form” (p. 15)

In the above excerpt, the lack of punctuation adds to the poetic marvel; the garden pathing and gentle echoes are genius.

Throughout the collection, Donish takes us from one vivid image to another. I compare it to being in a maze of floral shrubs, that, even when you are not led directly to your destination, the journey is aromatic and enjoyable, and all I wanted to do is be lost in her poems forever. Read the beginning of “The Leaf Mask”

“she saw real birds
as wind-up birds with intricate
machinery, their whistles, the metal

architecture of their wings—she saw
them perched atop the hospital,
where exhausted women brought

catatonic lovers. She thought,
all buildings are wild, inviting people into
their mouths. One day she’ll chew

the crowd to dust, spit out bones, watches,
doves.” (p. 59)

Refreshing—the best word to describe this collection. The shorter poems were consistently engaging and vivid, and I was torn between wanting to read it all in one sitting and wanting to savour it, piece by piece, slowly melting on my tongue. The book ends in the titular poem, “The Year of the Femme”, which is lyrical in its dualistic interplay of form and text. In the first stanza, Donish writes:

“I grew up swimming in a slow-moving river, in words like sister and girls. I knew a waist was supposed to be soft, knew when it should be covered, when revealed.”

The final poem is rich with eroticism, with sensuality, with the perfect combination of tight prose-poetry and loose verse. I find it hard to objectively describe the poetry, because, it is so much more than vocabulary choice or skilful editing. No, we’re taken on a journey, a boat ride with your hands running across the river’s cool surface. Even in the structural dichotomy, Donish’s voice remains effortless and ever-present. “The Year of the Femme” is filled with queerness and the nostalgia of past experience which might be clearer now, but she goes through them as if it’s her first time, living them as they should have been lived to begin with. And that’s the most touching aspect of the whole collection. Donish embeds her voice in crystal clear images, which in their fragmentation become so complete.

And as the words take a life of their own, as the ink separates from the paper, we’re given a clearer identity while strengthening our connection with our surroundings; each breath becomes a lyrical exchange, to and fro. The essence of being elevates itself to an aesthetic way of being.

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*I received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for the free poetry collection.*

I am not sure how to rate the poetry collections. I loved half the poems and I don't know if I understood the other poems.

I liked the tone of the poems, the references to Virginia Wolf, T S Eliot, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson and also the topics of the poems which were all very human. We don't need binarisms and fixed genders to be okay! Some poems were very beautiful, other parts of poems I didn't really get. But that might be me. In addition, the layout was quite weird: I don't think that my Kindle got the way were supposed to look on page right. It was all over the place, different lines started in one line, it was weird. Maybe it was on purpose but I just don't know.

Here are some quotes from some of the poems that somehow worked for me. Poetry is very personal, so make up your own mind:

"If he ever moves out, she'll think about getting a dog.
Being a woman means needing a little protection
She gets a little anxious when he travels
The dog will make her feel safe living alone"

"She notices that women are miserable and happy
She notices that some men are empty and try to make women empty
She notices that she makes a lot of generalizations'

"Is there a way to shed gender but admit to its effects"

"Today the leaves crack like glass,
they let the wind in
Today she has mixed feelings
About pronouns and also the snow"

3,5-4 Stars because maybe I didn't get all the poems.

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"She wants the fall leaves to stay
She wants them to because they won't
She knows this"

This is definitely a... unique collection. I pulled here one of the more coherent thoughts, and tbh there aren't many. NOW that's not really fair for me to say, because obviously the poet has thoughts that make sense to her. However I don't feel that this is a collection to which many will connect, and it's because we're not really given the opportunity. Poetry is personal, of course, but the reader has to at minimum make sense of it. One of the beautiful things about poetry is that 30 people can read something and come away with 30 interpretations because people tend to be narcissistic and we want to see ourselves in everything and it makes us feel connected to each other and at one with the universe even though we're having a wholly personal and individual experience is this relatable to anyone whatsoever? Anyway I just. Couldn't see myself or any other humans in this. I mostly felt confused. I DO give it props for being very original and for talking about gender and for being not at all repetitive.

*Quote is from an unfinished review copy and may not match the final version. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for advance access to this collection in exchange for an honest review.

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I appreciated the themes of femininity and body, but the writing style was messy and disconnected in a way that worked against understanding the message. Also as Donish talks about gender she admits to using "a lot of generalizations", which she says is not wholly untrue, but come from resentment and socialization. I feel if you want to write a book dissecting gender, do it completely and tear down why and how it hurts people. This feels more like snarky parody with a girl needing a dog because now she's single and has no one to protect her. Maybe I didn't get what this storytellers view of women are miserable and happy was supposed to be, but it was boring to read about and added little new. I received a copy through NetGalley in exchange for a honest reivew. 

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I wanted to love this so bad, my mind didn't want to though. This poetry collection is about body and gender and I appreciate that we don't see a lot of it out there. I both loved and loathed how this was written. It felt like I was given 5 different pieces of string and each one pulled me in a different direction. Which would be the point Cassie is trying to portray but as a reader, it's especially confusing not to know. I liked Tenderness more than the others because it had an element of subliminal darkness even with its simplicity. I didn't particularly like that a lot of them had a love element because I felt that it took the focus off what the poem was trying to portray and display to us.
I generally feel deep gratitude for this book because I know that some people feel like this; it is confusing and not easy.

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I was hoping that I would enjoy this more but I didn't find that poetry really isn't for me.

I found it didntbkeep my attention but I really wanted to try and read.

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Astute observations captured in lyrical, almost stream-of-consciousness style poetry. Observations and visions of nature
mingle with internal thoughts and feelings, making up a rich bouquet of connections. Nature and humanity, knowledge and belief, memories and dreams, love and life.

I think perhaps the poet's writing style fits the longer poems better, or at least the longer poems were the ones that stood out to me more. I especially liked Portrait of a Woman, Mid-Fall and Modern Weeds.
But the most striking of the bundle was the poem The Year of the Femme. To me it read as the fragmented/distilled memories of a youth spent trying to figure out gender, trying to find oneself. It had an appealing sense of nostalgia to it.

My copy seemed to be missing line breaks and page breaks in many places, though it being poetry I can't be sure that wasn't the intention. It made it hard to ascertain where one poem ended and another began though, resulting in a feeling of restlessness because there were no built-in natural stopping points to take a moment to reflect on what I was reading (which I often like to do when reading poetry).

On the whole I think this collection of poetry has immense value, highlighting queer experience as something beautiful, worth celebrating and deliberating on in the form of poetry.

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It took me no more than 20 minutes to read through this.. mess.
There were a total of 2 poems that I was able to read fully, without thinking about it making no sense. Maybe it had to do with the funky format that the entire thing had, or I don’t know.. I just.. I couldn’t.

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I understand that this poetry collection has won awards. However I am rating it at 1 star. Took me a total of about half an hour to read. And I honestly should have DNFed it halfway through.
I didn't enjoy it at all. A lot of the lines and the phrases didn't even particularly make sense with the line either above or below it. Which made it very confusing.
Now I do write poetry myself, so it's not a lack of interest in poetry. And I've read some really understanding and well written poetry collections. And I just don't think that this is one of them.
I wish I could have found myself relating to it, but due to the confusing nature of it, I couldn't even find myself understanding what a lot of the phrases or verses were even trying to suggest. There is a severe lack of punctuation where punctuation should be. I understand that punctuation in poetry can often be very subjective to the author themselves. But it almost seemed like there was little understanding of how to end a verse. Sometimes there was capitalizations for no reason in the middle of a sentence, without punctuation or proper line breaks for multiple pages.

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The Year of the Femme by Cassie Donish is a 2018 Iowa Poetry Prize-winning collection. Donish holds a BA in English and comparative religions from the University of Washington, and an MA in human geography from the University of Oregon. She currently teaches classes at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where she's pursuing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing.

The collection opens with "Portrait of a Woman, Mid-Fall." A woman alone thinks of life and dreams while at the same time autumn is in view out the window. There seems to be a trap between security -- man or a dog, happiness or misery. There is a binary world that restricts dreams and time that limits choices. The yellow leaves dance on the wind while the red leaves crunch as they are crushed underfoot. Every day the number of leaves on the trees decrease and the number on the ground increase -- like discarded dreams. The woman wishes she can stop the leaves from changing merely because she knows she cannot. One thing cannot exist without its opposite.

Arrival is not a rival of departure
The two have to work together to make anything happen
All the clocks move together through time

Donish uses language and creates stunning images. Poems in the second section combine memories and impressions:

Daylight glinting off dimes in the grass
Daylight, and our teeth don’t feel
different yet

Daylight on top of the city, on top
of the lake
Daylight through a sieve of fingers
Mimics the skyscrapers
"Meanwhile, in a Galaxy"

The final section, "The Year of the Femme," revisits the concept of the binary in two-part poems. The first part consists of prose poetry, complete sentences, and formed in a near perfect block. The other element of the verse is chaotic in the arrangement of phrases and line breaks. Each half compliments the other much like arrival and departure. A wonderful collection of poetry. Truly, one of the best in contemporary poetry.

Available April 1, 2019

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