Starfish Over Oyster
by Heather Palmer
Love Symbol Press, May 2013
60 pages / $12 ($1 PDF)  Buy from Love Symbol Press

If you didn’t know how a starfish eats an oyster it does it like this,

There’s no description of the act itself in Heather Palmer’s Starfish Over Oyster (except the reference in the title) but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a great metaphor for a book about hunger control, voice and violence. Starfish Over Oyster takes place in the mouth and the stomach. Heather Palmer writes like a shotgun blast and a jawbreaker. There’s a burst of ideas tucked into an intimate shell you have to suck on. Each line is compact and dangerous; some slip by while others kept me rereading them or turning back to them pages later.

Visually the book is beautiful. The layout looks perfect. Everything seems so precise, largely due to the pages’ ample negative space. The poems themselves, flush left and right, look like constrained little packages, small but dangerous. That being said, Starfish Over Oyster takes time to process; there’s no fat in the language and the subject matter is dark. It’s about a girl consumed by a city, her father, and hunger itself.

READ MORE >