Review of Helen Mort’s Illustrated Woman

Here’s my review of Helen Mort‘s Illustrated Woman on the Mechanics’ Institute Review:

When she is angry, Mort’s writing has a dignity that makes her argument persuasive and vital. At her most gentle, her language is strong, muscular, and no word is wasted. Every phrase is taut, like it’s relaxing after a trip down the gym. It would be a fruitless exercise to ask a workshop to strip out the extraneous language from Mort’s poems. It’s as if, when she was a kid, she was told she couldn’t go out until she’d removed every stray adjective, errant sentence construction, dubious syntax from her work, and the message stuck with her. Or more likely, she took her poems to a workshop and they were ripped apart, and vowed not to leave herself open to that humiliation again. Her poems demonstrate not just innate ability, but hard work, the craft of the edit, the refusal to give up until every burr has been rounded off. We, the readers, benefit from this.