Billie Swift's Everything Here Reviewed at The Rumpus

Emily Pérez reviews Billie Swift's chapbook, Everything Here (Sibling Rivalry Press), in which tensions "arises in the confines of the feminine," for The Rumpus. "[It] is 'I,' not shadows, that 'creep around bend around,' an image evocative of the mad narrator at the end of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" writes Pérez, "who has been so confined by domestic life that she creeps in repetitive circles around her attic room." More: 

...Here, Swift’s shuffled lines create haunting, breathtaking possibilities.

“The Way it Expands” also looks at the “homemaker” who interacts with a gray hair she finds “in the dough”: “She says—Hair, of course I still love you. / Of course you can stay.” This surreal piece ends with her eating the hair and the dough, and the reminder that “Raw dough will kill a dog. The / way it expands, maybe—or how hunger has / nothing to do with it.” As a title, “The Way it Expands,” might refer to the dough, or to the life the homemaker has not noticed passing before her. By the end, expansion clearly refers to the dough, but it still contains the idea of time, such that consuming time may have nothing to do with actually desiring it. Still it expands; still it kills us.

Read on at The Rumpus.