Inner Sky

"I am alive," Lori Desrosiers asserts at the end of her harrowing, potent, and necessary chapbook, Inner Sky, which details a cage formed by domestic-abuse. In poem after poem her fluctuating pronouns expose blurred boundaries (between self and other, beloved and despised) typical to the abuse-dynamic. Her re-visitation of past tragedy and its players comes at the reader forcibly-in the form of "wire cutters," "bitter beets," an "ice crow," and "the dark of the pantry." This is the shedding of rotten images and masks. Yet, what else can a woman do to heal from domestic-abuse but "clean him from her mind"? Desrosiers goes one step better by offering us this book which bravely "lends a hand/ to others mired in storm."

—Jennifer Jean