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[This review was first posted in 15 Bytes Magazine October 2013]

In poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s debut collection But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), the diction is daring, the voice muscular. In “Why I Want To Be A Tow Truck Driver,” she writes,

See the snowclouds
thrusting over the range
like a cough,
a hard-packed fist? This is how
I come. Free of disguise.
Because life is hard but also crisp and literary…

In “Circles in the Sky” the throat is “my throat zone/ of av...