It was my good luck to come upon Carolyn Guinzio’s new book, Cameo Blue (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2026), her eighth collection, after reading her immersive 2024 chapbook, Meanwhile in Arkansas, winner of the Quarterly West Chapbook Prize. Guinzio, a native of Chicago who has lived in Arkansas for many years, writes with unflagging intensity at the intersection of interior life with the natural and domestic worlds. In the chapbook, a boy waits on a mountain all day “to take a blurry / photo” of a passing train. The poem “Phoebe Hill” asks: “that is his blur what is yours . . .” The full-length collection, Cameo Blue, explores this question in the poem “Constellation, Detail”:
and from where I am,
from where I am not,
I draw a line between
my small hoard of salt
and carbon to yours
What an ingeniously stripped and accurate image—humans as “hoards” of salt and carbon. Here, Guinzio reports at an elemental level while the poem itself enacts an impulse to connect, to “draw a line” between an “I” and a “you.”
From the margins of individual consciousness, speakers observe birds, fields, and water. The human-built and natural worlds blur. From “Earthshine”:
A luminous
river dwindles
into a city.
. . .
A genius
at disappearance,
it takes everything
out to sea.
In “This Is What Makes Something Real,” a cottage is “the size / of the mind, a blank taking / up space where the moon / should have been.” The stakes are high again in “The Floor Collapsed in a Fire and the Carpet Became a Cup,” where books burn in a house fire, “[e]nds of sentences / eternally burned off.” (As seems all too true in the human world, “[t]he margins / burnt first.”
Though Guinzio does not bring specific identities or biographies into her book, mothers appear throughout. In “Late Fall,” a mother was unpinning “freezing sheets” she had hung outside to dry. Meanwhile, “some other mother” was “staying inside, / leaving the sheets to hang in their coats of sleet.” The high-pitched assonance of the long “e” in “freezing,” “sleet” and “sheets”—indoor bedding which can or should be a comfort—casts a jarring, even funereal, mood. The sheets might allude to a shroud.
The contradiction appears again in “Comfort(er),” the title ironically referring to another kind of bedding (or even a parent) where no comfort will be found. Instead, “[a] boulder was rolled to obscure a crevasse into which / no one should fall.” Despite this effort to obscure, “memory” may drop into a cave while one waits “to hear it hit whatever lies at the bottom of the deepest / groove of the mind. To hit where the truth lies.” But truth, whatever that might be, is elusive for Guinzio’s speakers. Mother and child in the poem “know this: The All Clear / never means All or Clear.”
A mother appears again in “Compass.” The speaker pulls a bird’s nest out of a tree, believing it was empty and therefore safe for the birds: “Mother had // been gone / so long, we / thought: forever.” This belief proves incorrect. The speaker turns and sees the mother bird perched on the gutter,
one round
eye facing
toward,
one away,
as if to say:
Even when
I am gone
I am
not
gone.
The poem ends with a period, perhaps suggesting a hope that a mother might go on forever, if only through its nest or progeny.
Any such hope is undercut in “Center,” in which the speaker and a partner are
holding hands as if we couldn’t
see that each key had helicoptered
down from a solitary maple
to land on the sidewalk, alone.
The maple key is the tree’s seed. Each maple key in the poem is not only alone, as is its “solitary” parent, but will not germinate where it lands, on the human-made concrete of a sidewalk.
The eerie “Down Ballot” begins with the subtle and lovely couplet, “Winter sent its birds into October / that year, testing the clear, unscented air.” But the speaker was down on the ground where “[i]t wasn’t safe. The ground had been planted / with holes.” How can ground be planted “with” holes? Plants, even bodies, are placed “in” holes. The disorientation continues with the speaker and other mourners
. . . standing near
the foot of your grave, talking about how
you must like it there, it being a high-
traffic spot, a fast-moving spot over which
others didn’t linger.
The grieving survivors “spin it like this: // At least your winter is over. At least / you didn’t live to see what was to be.”
In “Absence of Image,” a poem that strikes me as an ars poetica, boys catch “an iron wedge” while they are magnet fishing. I had to look this up. If you haven’t heard of this interesting phenomenon, people go fishing with magnets. They have pulled from rivers, lakes and ponds not only random pieces of metal but guns and unexploded ordnance. In Guinzio’s poem, the seemingly unremarkable iron wedge the boys pull from the water might have held “some- / thing up—a bridge—” When the boys bring it home, it does the opposite: “on the porch table it held / things down instead.” The wedge later manifests a surprise:
When the sun was low,
through the hole in its side
came a beam that made
a perfect circle of light
on the rusted floor
of what looked, then,
like a tomb of the buried-
alive
Despite the comparison of the floor to a tomb, the speaker intended “before it was too late . . . / to look / closely” at the circle of light. Why? Perhaps to be able to remember “the aura cast on the one / flawless thing the broken / and lost could still make.”
The poem ends with a period, a kind of assertion. Maybe a broken thing can create something flawless. Here, the wedge was pulled from water by the attraction between an old piece of iron and a magnet, a magnet lowered into water by hopeful boys. Maybe, though, this is making too much of a beautiful poem. The last poem in the book, “Moon, Real and Reflected,” like a handful of others, ends without punctuation:
It’s safe
to say now, from this distance wobbling in the blue
basket of a yellow balloon, that everything ends,
and everything ends in water, or, what doesn’t end
in water ends in light, or what doesn’t end in light doesn’t
What doesn’t happen? Everything ends in water, or light or if not light, then what? The poem, like the book, does not commit. The book is ending without a period or other cue. Guinzio’s poems do not insist or advocate. They bring the reader into a human space where speakers contend with grief or fear, alone and unsure whether others of like feeling might be found. In Guinzio’s hands, the effort of contending might be enough.