Press / Reviews

Flash Nonfiction: The Craft of Tiny Truths

Sean Glatch: Writers.com

“Sanguine” by Molly Akin

Read it here, in Brevity. 

Our animal hearts once bloody / bloodthirsty now tamed to optimism.

This is a great example of how flash forms push the shape of language to speak in such small spaces. Here, Akin interrogates language itself to understand and convey the painful nature of miscarriage. 

This hybrid, braided essay interweaves the author’s own experiences with definitions and etymologies. If anything, I find those definitions to be the most painful, salient moments of the work: it defines the author’s own pain without directly naming it. 

You can also see the craft tools of poetry in action: concision, internal line breaks, evolution in form, and a tension propelled by word play.

A Close Reading of Molly Akin's Poem "Mothering is a social construct, and I am motherless"

Michael Mercurio: A Slight Case of Overthinking

… The word “now” being on its own line puts a tremendous amount of pressure, of stress, on that word — this is no accident; that linebreak isn’t just an act of whimsy, but an announcement that there has been a breathturn in the poem, that we are moving into something like the denouement, though I can’t say that as we encounter an “absence” that “is definite” that we are finding full closure. Though we may be, as the speaker tells us that “an old / bell rung” — no punctuation, no finality at the end of the poem, and a tremendous caesura between “an” and “old,” which is a striking part of that line; there’s far more space than text, a gnawing sense of emptiness and only the most tenuous of connections there between those words. It feels like grief. It feels like realization. It feels a little bit like letting go. …

Praise for Hospice

Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract and Dilemma

As its title suggests, Molly Akin’s debut chapbook, Hospice, is about end-of-life care––a poet bearing witness to and participating in her mother’s final weeks and days––but the etymological root of that word, the Latin hospitem, meaning “guest, stranger, sojourner, visitor,” is also very much at stake. In these poems, the reader sojourns across a defamiliarized world, acutely described with a Dickinsonian economy and cataloged, freshly, by Akin’s fine-toothed aesthetic. Akin’s is not the language of life but the language of death, of near-death and after-death: that fragment, or moan that is whispered across the “gash // wound” between the living and the dying (for in Hospice, there is nothing so gentle as a “veil”). As her mother dies from a long cancer––“spider pain / leg pain / bone pain,” her “tail / tucked / between / bone”––the poet dares also to look closely at her own flesh, her image a “coiled / Siren,” her body also a mother’s body, aging, resilient, pained, ancestral, capable, moving through time: “One big contraction,” she writes, “And it is our life / Looking back.” But for as much as this book looks back––and it does, at the poet’s origins, at language’s deep lineages, at Dickinson herself––it also gazes forward, toward a world marked by new absence and yet newly possible. “It took her / death / to wrest / my self // from / her––,” Akin writes. And that is the difficult space where these poems sit vigil: bedside new knowledge. 

Tatiana Johnson-Boria, author of Nocturne in Joy

Molly Akin’s Hospice unearths the hidden beauty and devastation at the root of grief. From the life cycles of ladybugs, orchids, and loved ones, Akin offers a meditative glimpse into the ephemeral nature of living, the consuming nature of loss, “the keening cry of a bird,” and “the waters no damn can hold.” With lightness and depth, this collection unravels the sacred contradictions that sustain us, the ones embedded in being alive, of mothering, of losing and loving, again and again.

Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Bad Mexican, Bad American; The Lighthouse Tattoo; The Parachutist; Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man

Mothering, compassion, lineage—Akin explores the mega sphere that is contemporary motherhood in this striking chapbook collection. In a lean but hard-hitting, visceral verse, Akin ardently depicts what it is like dealing with the loss of a mother, void and haunting memory. A strong, memorable debut collection!