Reviews: EcoTheo Review and Anomaly

Recognition: Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry Winner
The Other Big Book Award in Poetry and Reader’s Choice Finalist
CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry Finalist

Praise:

Salt Body Shimmer delivers girls and women with their hearts and strides unbroken, however provoked by deadening violences. Aricka Foreman’s deft lyric is both canopy and camouflage, beyond able to outwork predators and the hard silences they will against laughter, booty clap, and no. Aricka Foreman’s debut collection declares its right to everyplace, finds its heroes, and offers “a spell for everything.” I’ve not read or heard poems like these. “Out of a grave vision,” Foreman condenses the accumulated pain of subjugations and raises a dazzling mist to cool our eyes, our tired flesh.

—Ladan Osman, Exiles of Eden

The music of Salt Body Shimmer is deep bass and improvisation. Here, both skill and freestyle show how the two coexist intentionally, defiantly, the lyrics and rhythm winding through mental and physical consciousness with reversals that equal each other in power and artistry. What we think we know, what exists and what pretends, a people and a person, a city and a history all shapeshift and multiply as they converse, sometimes in the same line: “while an ancient thing waits, takes a drag / off my breath.” Aricka Foreman’s work haunts us with aliveness — nights, June, glass, flame, lush green, silver pans, wet ground. Even the unsaid personifies an embodied presence of memory. “The sea knows everything / And forgets no one,” she writes, and, “Sun drunk and bruised,” with a soul-deep Detroit voice carrying through on a blues moan, “blues inevitable,” Foreman’s crystalline début catapults the language of love and suffering — that is to say, poetry — toward its most effective and affecting state: transformation.

—Khadijah Queen, Anodyne

As vital as water is to the human body, Salt Body Shimmer proves just as indispensable. Adorned in the ‘camouflage it takes to be a woman’ Aricka Foreman invites us to wade into an iridescent realm of Blue Magic. Each poem in this book washes up like a seashell—beautiful yet sharp. It is in your best interest, dear reader, to collect such marvels for safekeeping.

—Alison C. Rollins, Library of Small Catastrophes

Review in F Newsmagazine

Praise:

These poems are the electrified songs of grief, spinning the reader into an awakened state: one where we are forced to not just live, but love the sometimes brutal act of staying.

—Rachel McKibbens, author of blud

Dream with a Glass Chamber is a stark and startling collection made from cities and ghosts, empty whiskey glasses and loss, fire and the ashes that remain. In poem after poem, Aricka Foreman shapes that wreckage into a remarkable elegy. Hers is a vision that’s not content to merely grieve, but one that wrestles grief as if demanding an explanation. “I want to make something useful” she writes, and what she has made here is a light in the dark, an enduring monument.

—Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design

The elegy which weaves the poems in Dream With A Glass Chamber lives in threshold: in the rooms of dream, in the change of season. And what lingers is the conversation between the living and the beloved. A tender, moody and resilient collection.

—francine j. harris, author of Here is the Sweet Hand

This book, a conjuring, a spell to bring back the dead, or to let the dead go. Every poem a city, or forest, or wall of thorns, or hush, or whisper, or hiss, or haunting. A voice in an echoing stone room, a woman staring down a mirror, through herself, asking when will it stop, asking how to begin again. She says "I've made my way through/ the year of burying." She says "Every joy comes like a fist around the heart." She says "I don't see you anywhere/ and you are everywhere,/ singing my favorite song of rope." Foreman enters grief ferociously and open-eyed, and returns to us shaken, but willing to speak, and I thank her for that.

—Ben Clark, author of if you turn around I will turn around