Sam Levy

The poems in Laura Read’s collection, This Serious World, read like diary entries, confessions, and letters meant to document memories and make observations about mental health, illness, motherhood, family, suffering, and what it is to be human. Using long, sprawling sentences that bubble over into multiple stanzas, Read’s poems evoke a sense of nostalgia and a longing for the past while also offering up big truths arrived at through simple moments. Some of the poems directly address poet Sylvia Plath, updating her on what it is to suffer as a writer and as a woman in today’s world. Others include pop culture references to everyone from Marguerite Duras to Madonna. This Serious World is presented with a transparency that is gloomy at times, but the collection also reminds the reader not to take life too seriously, providing an antidote to the world’s seriousness in the form of touching moments, humor, and solace.

            Read’s stanzas read almost like stream-of-consciousness thoughts, with her associations bouncing into memories that bounce into observations and back again. Her long sentences spill their contents, their ideas cascading down the page, asking the reader to follow her winding ways. The work’s tone is relaxed, conversational, and approachable. In the poems where she directly addresses Sylvia Plath, Read speaks to Plath as if she is an old friend with whom Read has had regular correspondence. Taken together, the author’s style and the collection’s structure work to make the reader feel like they are being told whispered details of memories, reflections, and truths that are passed from friend to friend.

            With gentle yet intensive honesty, This Serious World addresses fundamentals of life, like motherhood and depression, portraying these issues in a way that enables the reader to relate to or learn about multiple dimensions of human experience. Read also includes several simple pleasures, largely rooted in nostalgia, as if she sees the past in a joyous whirl—days of driving around in friends’ cars, of being a camp counselor at the lake, of wearing leg warmers and silver bracelets. Her memories act as anchors, as personal and cultural touchstones that lend almost a comfort and sense of familiarity to the work.

            In choosing to address Sylvia Plath in her collection, Read is also assuredly taking on the task of exploring feminist issues, especially by looking through the lens of women’s issues today versus during Plath’s time, as well as Read’s own personal experience of being a woman contrasted with Plath’s. Read’s take on these issues is nuanced in line with these comparisons. She admits that she prefers familiar women, those who have been as societally conditioned as she has. “But in print,” she writes, “I want a woman who tells / the truth. Who resists…” Somehow Read has a way of treating such concepts with delicacy and intimacy but also often with cutting sincerity.

            Even more fundamental to the work than themes like mental health, feminism, or a romanticized past is Read’s exploration of what it is to be a human being. At times, she uses simple language to capture sweeping ideas, particularly regarding deep-seated yearning: “Today I am hungry in a way / that makes me realize I have never been hungry.” At others, she uses herself and her own body to give context to human experiences, such as when she says, “Look at these new lines sweeping back / under my eyes. I like them. They look like wings…that just keep on opening.”

Her evocative collection also reminds us that as humans, “It’s hard to know what it’s okay to ask for.” Read demonstrates that the uncertainty of being a human and the seriousness with which we often approach the world can be broken up here and there if we only look to the simple moments, to the past, to each other. Solace is there, awaiting.