Expecting Something Else

by A.M. O'Malley

Based on a true story and in a unique voice – both touching and funny – A.M. O’Malley provides a poignant and beautiful book of prose poems that captures the experience of growing up on back roads, in smoky bars and kitchens full of women. She writes about striking out into the world alone and finding her way and her truth. O’Malley breaks from traditional forms to tell her story with a hybrid of narrative and lyricism and explores the possibilities that happen when form is broken.

Genres: Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2016

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An explosive series of maternal campfires, with the words stacked tall and lean and treacherous and then set aflame from below. This is emotional charred kindling and its smoke is mysterious and sometimes even soothing.

[dc · Rating 5 out of 5]

good gravy that was good.

[Brook · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a charming and bittersweet gut punch. The three sections intermingle stories of a motherhood/childhood punctuated by cars, boyfriends, and escaping. I brought to it a lens of my own childhood, and each line was a difficult joy. I am excited to see what AM writes next, because her words bound off the page. The addition of erasure poems from a book about mothers punctuates these with a world of reclaimed truths.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetic, yes? Poems, no. Prose poems? Creative nonfiction? I don't know. Does it matter? It's genreless, or supposed to be. But I'm not sure the current trend of noncategorization really does much for anything, poetry or otherwise. Everything is something, right?
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I read this out of order, reading all the * pieces, then ** pieces, then finally the *** ones, and I feel like that's the way to read it as it provides a sort of natural feeling progression from a child, to adolescence, to adulthood, or something similar.
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Once again, I feel like story takes precedent over poetry here. Yes, these things happened. But, so what? What new things do they provide the reader to take away, or take into, the world? Personally, I struggle (have been struggling) to read much that allows me to do this, to learn some new way of seeing the world. There's a lot of poets/poems/poetry that simply want to tell me what has happened, and sometimes the reality of what happened does not make for the best poem and I question whether or not the writer has dug deep enough into the past to bring up the dirt. The attempt is there, but I also had a life worth writing about. Why should anyone else care to hear about it?
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The crying circus elephant will haunt me. :(

[Sarah Cheshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous vivid writing, packed with wit, grit, rage, and imagination. Using erasure, non-linear prose, and harrowing shards of memory, A.M O'Malley beautifully captures the experiences of dislocation, inter-generational trauma, and resurrection; entering old wounds, while refusing to remain stuck within them

[tonia peckover · Rating 5 out of 5]

(All books get 5 stars) Phenomenal use of form to explore the treacherous ground of a mother/daughter relationship. I can't quit thinking about the technique and the emotional punch it gives.