Meditations on "Hollow", by Marjorie Manwaring

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Meditations on “Hollow” offers a series of musings, a collage of what the word “hollow” conjures. These associative leaps transport us back and forth between observations of the physical world, memory, and those rare, almost imperceptible, moments that we can mistake as insignificant. At one point the narrator recalls preadolescence and the accompanying head full of rumination and ritual—a bubbling cauldron—with this memory ending on the line: “A form of poetry gone awry.” We might imagine each section in this chapbook as a bubble from that same, albeit now midlife, head, a little less roiling but still potent. And maybe we can imagine a little incantation, a little transformation, and watch “A form of poetry gone awry” rearrange itself into “The awry as a form of poetry.” Marjorie Manwaring lives in Seattle where she is a technical writer and poet. She has served on the editorial boards of DMQ Review and Floating Bridge Press and is the author of Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape (Mayapple Press, 2013) and What to Make of a Diminished Thing (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). A recent poem of hers can be found on: https://natureofourtimes.poetsforscience.org/how-do-i-know/.