Marie Rickmyer’s On the Verge is a delicate, unflinching collection of poems exploring life, trauma, and family. Each piece drips with nostalgia, capturing the quiet fragility of memory—like a glass pane trembling under the weight of lived experience. Rickmyer invites readers into intimate spaces: kitchens brimming with warmth and chaos, childhoods that linger like faint scars, and moments suspended between joy and sorrow. Here, nostalgia and trauma are not at odds but intertwined, stitched together by subtle, aching beauty—a weight of sunlight, the quiet despair of witnessing your mother as both parent and person.

Reading these poems feels like overhearing deeply personal conversations—tender, raw, and unfiltered. Rickmyer’s words evoke the weariness of her mother, the emptiness left by absence, and the heavy silence of unspoken longings. It is not a collection concerned with life’s grandeur but with its endurance: the sacred moments hidden within the mundane.

From the start, On the Verge captivated me with its thematic focus on memory, trauma, and fractured families. Admittedly, I hesitated at first—the poem structure and style felt unconventional—but the writing quickly grew on me. Each piece unfolded like a film, vivid and visceral, with no pretense or grandiosity. Rickmyer’s simplicity is piercing. Her lines feel less like crafted poetry and more like confessions, whispered truths, or rants from someone intimately familiar. For a moment, you are there—in her mother’s kitchen, at the edge of her grief, alongside flowers bathed in memory—transported not just into her life but, uncannily, into your own. The poems “Pantoum on Mother” and “Elegy for My Brother” are especially powerful, confronting the quiet burdens we carry and the losses we never fully release. Rickmyer captures what we inherit and what we endure, often at the same time. Her language is so personal, her imagery so immediate, that the connection feels inevitable. It resonates deeply, like a shared ache you never realized existed.

Marie Rickmyer’s On the Verge holds a quiet power, subtle yet relentless, like a stream carving its path through stone. By the final poem, I felt as though I had lived through a lifetime of someone else’s struggles and small victories. It is a book I will return to—a companion for moments when I need to be reminded of the quiet beauty of endurance. On the Verge is intensely personal yet strangely familiar, as though Rickmyer isn’t just telling her story but yours, too. It is a testament to the weight of memory and the tenderness of survival—an unforgettable offering of truth, nostalgia, and fragile beauty.

Pages: 74 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DFMVG9DD