It Is All Equally Fragile

From Alison Malee — New York City poet, performer, artist, and author. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Bustle, The American Library of Poetry, and Tiffany & Co. She teaches poetry and creative writing workshops across all ages and backgrounds and has built an Instagram community of 148,000 readers drawn to her emotionally precise, botanically alive, and deeply female-centered voice. It Is All Equally Fragile is her fourth collection — and her most expansive. Malee began with desire. Then she wrote about loss. Then identity and roots. This book is where it all opens out. Her poetry collections are about expression, family, femininity, and the possibility that exists within us — and "It Is All Equally Fragile" is where those threads converge most completely. This is a collection about the interior life of women across the full span of their lives and relationships: as women in the plain sense of being alive in a female body, with all the hope and fragility that entails; as lovers navigating the specific ache of wanting and being wanted; as friends holding each other through the things neither of you knows how to name; and as mothers, all of which gives this book tenderness and weight. The poetry here does not resolve. It does not reassure. It sits with you in the unresolved places and names them beautifully — the ambivalence of loving someone and drowning in their name simultaneously, the longing that whispers even when you know a door should stay closed. Malee works in lowercase, in images drawn from nature and the body, in the kind of language that reaches for the thing you felt but couldn't articulate and hands it back to you, articulated. As Malee has said of her own practice: she writes a significant amount about what it means to be a woman, and works to write pieces that are both powerful and encouraging for the women who need it as much as she does. This book is the fullest expression of that project yet.