it was never going to be okay

With a title like it was never going to be okay, it shouldn’t be a surprise that simpson’s debut is a raw, introspective portrait of trauma and healing. Detailing their experiences in foster care, living as a two-spirit trans woman, and doing the abiding work of learning love—of both the self and others—Simpson’s collection bears both the pointed clarity of reflection and the present-tense weight of emotion. Immediately notable in these poems is their precise, nimble control of language, and the rhythms take profound shape when read aloud. The poet’s background in spoken-word helps account not only for this pronounced auditory dimension to their work but also its highly narrativized form. Likewise, there’s an evident linear progression here, charting a course from early traumas, to lessons in (self-)love, to articulations of hope. The collection is at its best in its aching first half, as evidenced by the brilliant opening of “this woman//nookum*”—a poem detailing simpson’s painful relationship to their grandmother, where notions of identity abound, both immediately personal and residual of colonialist legacy: “how do i explain my queerness to the gatekeeper of my bloodline / when she flushed hers out with communion wine / & holy water?” But while the collection’s progression may be logical, the later poems aren’t punctuated with the same power, so the work seems finally to dwindle rather than crescendo.