Processing, by Amanda Russell reviewed by Kurt Luchs

Processing, a 2024 release from Main Street Rag and the latest chapbook from Amanda Russell, feels a good deal longer than its 31 poems and 40 pages, and I mean that in an entirely positive way. As a girlfriend of mine warned me at the beginning of our relationship, “I’m a lot.” She was indeed, and that’s what made her so interesting.

Russell writes in a conversational style that can incorporate the mundane and the extraordinary, and in her capable hands can find the extraordinary that is always lurking in the mundane if we stop to pay attention (which we might call the poet’s job description). Such attention engenders both wonder and gratitude. Speaking of which, here is the middle stanza from her poem, “The Month After Never Starting My Gratitude Journal, We Lunch Together”:

For Percy Spencer who invented the microwave.
For all the farmers of old and the ones still living.
For the many distant hands who made this soup possible.
For the chicken who wove bones, meat, and feathers
from the yellow silk of a world I’ll never live in.
For the Adam and Eve of chickens.

That delightful homespun litany is very much of a piece with the rest of this rich collection. There are a couple of actual love poems, like that one, but in truth almost every one of these carefully hand-carved verses is a love song for someone or something, some aspect of the amazing world the poet finds herself in.

As a result, this book becomes her gratitude journal, which, far from never starting, is never-ending. I don’t know whether happiness is a choice, but gratitude is. Russell has planted her flag there, and we, her lucky readers, can bask in the glow of the light her poems shed. That glow is hard won. It always is.

I want to mention just a few of the more outstanding poems. The book opens with “Cold Spaghetti on Friday the 13th,” an elegy for Louise Glück that is worthy of its subject. Russell recounts how on the day Glück died, one of the windows in their house shattered without warning or explanation: “Afternoon held its breath as we slipped on our shoes / to sweep up the delicate turned dangerous.” Somehow, afterward, she felt moved to make a series of flower offerings in remembrance, leaving them at the foot of a mulberry tree. It ends like this:

…Minute bouquets of salt marsh asters
that all season fought with drought spells and stand now,
taller in the cooling air—tossing their shadows
beneath the canopy of a greater shadow.

Another poem, “The Reader is Listening,” is dedicated to Jim Harrison. It’s about how great poetry can bring us into the presence of the poet. Russell feels the shade of Harrison has visited her as she reads his work. The poem ends:

Tell me: Can you stay awhile?
I’ll set the table, steep some tea.
Come talk with me. I’m listening.
Now, more than ever, we are listening to her.

Amanda Russell is a contemporary American poet whose 2024 chapbook Processing was published by Main Street Rag. She writes in a conversational style that blends the ordinary with the extraordinary, often turning everyday experiences into meditations on gratitude, love, and presence. In addition to her poetry, Russell has served as a guest editor at The Comstock Review and balances her literary work with life as a stay-at-home mother. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Shore, and her latest collection has been praised for its warmth, attentiveness, and ability to illuminate the beauty hidden in daily life.