Marvels

M.R. Sheffield’s Marvels is a s ance, a chant of snake bites, wrens, and spiders, nesting and untangling, the instinct of a mother disoriented by her grief, a daughter finding her way in sex and obsession, a family broken and searching for something to pull it back together. Sheffield utilizes H.D. Northrop’s found poems, which describe various creatures, to reveal the wild, instinctive nature of human emotion by repurposing Northrop’s descriptions and applying them to a family. Sheffield couples the poems with manipulated original images from Northrop’s text to drive the skepticism of the poems. Multiplied spiders in the wrong color, transposed boa constrictors, and streaked antelope eyes are juxtaposed with poems about familial grief and resentment, alerting the reader to her instincts. This is the collection that steps back and reveals that instead of visiting an exhibit, admiring the lifelike animals from the soft fur to the magnetizing eyes, wearethe exhibit, propped up and trapped behind the glass.