NOTES FROM THE CHAPBOOK LOVE LETTER CLUB

From: Gwynn Scheltema 
To:  Augury, by Melissa Thorne


Across the collection, birds appear not as symbols but as interlocutors, antagonists, and mirrors. In “Crow Gifts,” the corvid becomes a figure of cunning reciprocity, a creature whose “black hole eye” absorbs light and human behaviour alike. Thorne's craft lies in the way she braids folklore, natural observation, and social critique into a single gesture.

The interplay between human and animal intensifies in “Mother Hawk,” where starlings, doves, and the memory of a Cooper’s Hawk become part of a mother’s psychological landscape. The birds are agents with their own motives, capable of “psychological warfare,” yet they also anchor the speaker’s longing for a time when she could “parley with the birds again.” Thorne’s ability to hold contradiction—tenderness and irritation, nostalgia and overwhelm—gives the poem its emotional depth.

Motherhood is one of the collection’s most powerful through‑lines, rendered without sentimentality. “Fired in the Round” is a fierce incantation meditating on the maternal body as mythic, biological, and cultural battleground. The repetition—“i am. / i am a mother. / i am a mother who birthed a boy”—creates a ritualistic rhythm, while the imagery veers from ancient (“a lacewing locked in amber”) to grotesque (“womb full of shark teeth”). Thorne interrogates the contradictory expectations placed on mothers: to be origin and scapegoat, goddess and commodity, “soft clay fired in the round.” 

Illness becomes another site of augury. In “Swan Fingers,” Thorne confronts chronic disease with stark honesty. The opening line—“I hate sick people”—is deliberately jarring, setting the stage for a complex exploration of empathy, fear, and bodily betrayal. The descriptions of rheumatoid arthritis are vivid and unsettling: fingers “drifted, twisted, askew,” hands like “gloves a child pulled on / by themselves.” The line “You can leave a husband, but not your body” lands with devastating clarity. Thorne’s language is sharp, unsparing, and deeply embodied.

Form in Thorne’s work is varied and intentional. “Tripwire or Parenthood,” a concrete poem, retains its cascading energy even without the visual layout, enacting the instability it describe, capturing the electric unpredictability of parenting.

The collection closes with “Mind the Gap,” using spatial fragmentation to explore the liminal spaces where meaning accumulates: “In the gaps / between my son’s wrists, and the sleeves / of his pyjamas.” The poem’s structure—phrases separated by slashes, enjambed across white space—mirrors its thematic focus on the intervals that define a life: the pause between breath and candle flame, the crook of a toddler’s neck, the “pockets of yeasty dough left / to rise.” Ending on this note of quiet domesticity underscores Thorne’s belief that augury is not only found in birds and omens but in the small, intimate spaces.

Throughout Augury, Thorne’s metaphors are startling yet grounded, her imagery vivid and emotionally precise. She moves between humor, grief, rage, and wonder with a confidence rare in a debut. This chapbook does not merely suggest promise—it delivers a fully realized poetic vision. And it leaves the reader eager, even impatient, to see what Thorne will write next.

(this review has been edited for length)