Morphology, by Erica Miriam Fabri

Morphology is a beautiful, visceral account of unconventional love. In this, Fabri's second book, she writes of grief with a tender resilience. Her poems tell stories of what it is like to fiercely love a ghost, a first love that has died.

In her poem, "First Love," Fabri writes: Poetry is the only source of Light!

                Let's say I swallow, every last drop
                of every last thing, that I siphon out of you; then what?
                Do I make you brand new?

The urge to carefully remortalize lost love is a consistent theme in Morphology.

Another tale of ghostly love appears in the poem, “Closer: A Love Story,” the imagined retelling of a news story about a man named Le Van who “dug up his wife’s corpse and slept beside it for five years.” The poem describes what Le Van did when he brought his wife’s body back home:

                So he covered her,
                head to toe, in clay; spent the whole rainy season
                molding her back into the woman he remembered. 

The subsequent poem, “Le Van’s Wife Returns As A Red Bird To Thank Him For His Love” is told from his reincarnated wife’s perspective. In this way, the poem itself re-mortalizes her. She says:

                Thank you for loving me
                hard, for refusing to let me become
                invisible.

On the other end of the spectrum, Fabri writes what it is to fiercely love the promise of a person, a fetus in utero. In the book's final poem, Fabri writes daily letters to her son for the last thirty days of her pregnancy. The poem, titled "Thirty Days," is teeming with adoration and promise:

                We have walked at least
                one-thousand miles together, so far. We have
                eaten at least two-hundred apples. Just now,
                your right leg stretched itself out
                like a rubber band. I love you already.

These two opposite loves, maternal love and love-in-grief, meet perfectly in the poem “Two Kinds of Cake.” The poem opens with the lines:

                After I came home from your funeral,
                I baked forty-eight cupcakes
                for my son’s first birthday.

Morphology tells stories of violence, death, illness, and new life. Each of these elements are tied together by the books' one consistent theme: the capacity of the heart.