Hooked by Carolyn Smart

Reviewed by Mary Katherine Carr (Matrix 83 - summer 2009)

MATRIX RECOMMENDS

In this new collection, Carolyn Smart gives voice to seven notable and notorious women, each poem as engrossing as a found diary. From a glamorously reckless Zelda Fitzgerald (“they knew it was me from the records of my teeth / one small charred slipper”), to an aggressively fragile Carson McCullers (“I will eat up anyone who’ll let me / there is so much on earth I crave”), to a distressingly frank Jane Bowles (“no one thinks of ugly girls in beds: / their rustling, frightful eyeballs rolling in their heads, / I loved them because nobody else would”), the reader can only be “hooked” by these methodical, desperate, and poignant internalities.