Interior Femme

This was a book of powerful and evocative poems. The author is incredibly talented. I appreciated that the author used a variety of poetry styles in this book. The poems with different styling were immediately attention catching.

Books of poetry about women, femininity and what it means to be and have such things in the world are often the most haunting and heartbreaking works that one can read, And this book is no different.
This work focuses on the ideal of Western femininity which which as someone who lives in the West as it is called is very familiar with most of different ideas and archetypes that are brought about in this book.
Absolutely recommend this book.
It is hard to believe that this is Stephanie Berger's first book and I can only imagine how the future books are going to be just as stunning as this one,

Stephanie Berger's debut poetry collection is a lyrical and ethereal exploration of femininity and female relationships. Her poetry is embedded with beautiful, sticky phrases and metaphors that capture a slice of the experience of being a woman in America. While there were many nuggets of beautiful phrasing that I will take forward with me, her language also very occasionally veered into pedantic territory, feeling more like an academic discourse on womanhood than the vulnerable tellings of a single female voice. This led me to feel that some of the poems were unfinished and had not yet achieved their full potential.

Consistent threads throughout the collection include the connection between nature and women's bodies, the relationship between mother and daughter, the grief of losing a mother, the relationship between birth and creation, and negotiating the experience of womanhood into our relationships with men. Despite these reoccurring themes, the sheer quantity of poems in the collection ( a total of 47 poems in the ARC I received plus a foreword written in verse), means that not all of the poems had a clear connection to these themes. This left many of them feeling inaccessible to this particular reader since I found myself searching for meaning in their shared connections.

Favorite poems from the collection included: Prelude in the Key to Everlasting Life, From What Abyss of Memory, Introduction to the Mother, I Am Trying to Ground You & Have Been All Along, The Past is Not the Past, and Nothingland

Overall, I enjoyed reading this collection, but I found myself also wanting more from it. As a newer consumer of poetry without an academic background in it, this could easily be a reflection of my pedestrian understanding of poetry. As a frequent reader of feminist literature, I was excited by this title, so it was disappointing to find that maybe I wasn't the target audience that I thought I was. I think this title would be best enjoyed by lovers of experimental poetry and eco-poetry and those who have read contemporary poetry widely.

tysm netgalley & University of Nevada Press for the arc of interior femme. it is hard to believe this is a debut collection of poetry. stephanie’s work is stunning. these poems take a look at femininity and unwrap it as a concept, a feeling, a figure. they are layered, emotional and transcendent. i really loved this book