Amiss

A collection of poetic, surreal vignettes inspired by women who were either murdered or who are missing that chooses to focus not on gory circumstances but on personal details specific to each victim: an aqua hat with netting, a noisy car with a sticking clutch, a pack of playing cards found in a field, fifty-two tragedies that travel decades while exploring the vast American landscape, the flat rice fields of Louisiana, papaya and banyan groves native to Hawaii and the stringent waters of Lake Michigan. Amiss operates with specified focus and a panoramic lens to provide consistent yet changing perspectives offering both clarity and mystery.

Gina Ferrara's collection Amiss might be subtitled, "American Femicide": these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union, and our North American landscape (beautifully evoked), seems involved in their fates. Notice, for instance, how often the vaunted freedom of the road turns out to be something else for these passengers: women "driven in the direction / of what always goes wrong." Notice, also, the details, as Ferrara chooses her images with the fierce attention of an angelic detective-a bright blue van, a bible, a deck of cards spilled from an abandoned purse-so that an earned and grounded empathy propels the clear voice, along with the desire for justice. In these quick and vivid poems Ferrara makes of grief an illuminating fire, from which the poet speaks of and to the missing and dead women with exemplary, tenderly respectful, imagination, memory, and knowledge. I have so much admiration for this poet's courage-Ferrara has gone among the ghosts and faced the terror every woman in our violent homeland spends a significant portion of her life trying not to think about...-Laura Mullen