Poetry review – THE LIVES WE HAD BEFORE: Rachel Jeffcoat is impressed by the imagery and emotion in Vanessa Napolitano’s third collection
The Lives We Had Before
Vanessa Napolitano
Stanchion Books
ISBN 979-8-90214-228-7
71pp. $13.00
Vanessa Napolitano’s two previous poetry pamphlets, Birds and Bruises (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Various Magics (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2024), unearthed the depth and poignancy in everyday moments with a keen and revelatory eye. Her newest chapbook, The Lives We Had Before, shares that sensibility, but with a difference: here the moments don’t just resonate, but set off a tumbling spiral of memories that ache and heal by turns.
Take the collection’s title poem, in which the speaker and her family listen to old songs that open out into ‘a room we lived in’, each with its own atmosphere and sensory presence. The song California Stars is
full of the idea of you –
your existence calmly ahead of us.
A long-loved Kate Bush song means
The light is perfect. Everything is always so difficult.
Everything is almost possible.
This room is church.
At the end of the poem, the speaker envisions her daughter remembering this moment as a room of her own in future – exposing the irresistible pastime of poets and parents who can’t help turning the present into a memory, even while it’s still happening.
That incursion of past into present is especially strong in the collection’s moving central section about Napolitano’s deceased father, to whom the book is dedicated. Here the haunting starts explicitly, as the ghost of Salvador Dali appears on the lawn of the ‘bad neighbourhood’ hospice in which her father is dying. The poems that follow repeatedly try to pin the lost man down on the page, hedged about with loving particularities like the ‘four-by-four / with cigarette stubs and maps in the door’ in “Pork Chop”, or the ‘good whiskey; black coffee; a long meal out’ in “The Parade of Lost Fathers”.
Yet, over and over, the dead resist their conjuring, ‘never get[ting] past the front door’ (“Pork Chop”). In “My dead father tells me what heaven is like”, the slippery narrative refuses to be precise:
loose, but not unruly…
encouraged
but not mandatory…
you move without resistance
but there’s no floating.
In “I tell my dead father about being 41”, the speaker talks compulsively and without a response until the very last line. These poems are awash with a tender, unfillable longing that peaks as the man – and his daughter – watches and waits for his inevitable ‘horse to come in’.
Memory is not always a gentle haunting, and throughout this collection there are sharp edges that catch the reader unawares: the ‘oil slick escape route’ of a nightly drink in “Corking”, the helpless exhaustion of the speaker in “Creeper”, who almost tells a kind stranger that she is ‘also clinging on’, and the unsettling dream landscape in “The Man with the Leather Hat”.
There are real flashes of anger, too, in the sequence that returns compulsively to the woods, and to the wolves and men who lurk there. ‘A list exercise’ ironically downplays the ‘little indiscretions’ in which male violence hangs over the interaction like a pall, and the women are expected to know that ‘my body / is a body, is a problem’, and laugh. Even the hard-edged landscape conspires with the wolf against the speaker in the poem “Gristle”, its hostility clear in its ‘tree spikes bone bare’ and ‘high, thin clouds’.
In response, though, Napolitano offers not more hostility, but love, and a bittersweet awareness of the headlong rush of time. In ‘Even as this darkness is falling’, the speaker pauses a domestic task to ‘know I am folded into the shape/ that contains you the most’, and it’s these shapes of love that the reader is left with:
…in the late, sun-drenched midday we would plant the lily bulbs
in the soil that Stephen sieved for rubble, me digging holes with my big spade,
and you with your little green spade and dressed in the gardening apron that could wrap around twice.
(“I would give myself”)
Napolitano’s ability to combine evocative and delicate imagery with real rushes of feeling make this collection an unmissable read for 2026.
Aug 4 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Vanessa Napolitano
Poetry review – THE LIVES WE HAD BEFORE: Rachel Jeffcoat is impressed by the imagery and emotion in Vanessa Napolitano’s third collection
The Lives We Had Before
Vanessa Napolitano
Stanchion Books
ISBN 979-8-90214-228-7
71pp. $13.00
Vanessa Napolitano’s two previous poetry pamphlets, Birds and Bruises (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Various Magics (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2024), unearthed the depth and poignancy in everyday moments with a keen and revelatory eye. Her newest chapbook, The Lives We Had Before, shares that sensibility, but with a difference: here the moments don’t just resonate, but set off a tumbling spiral of memories that ache and heal by turns.
Take the collection’s title poem, in which the speaker and her family listen to old songs that open out into ‘a room we lived in’, each with its own atmosphere and sensory presence. The song California Stars is
full of the idea of you –
your existence calmly ahead of us.
A long-loved Kate Bush song means
The light is perfect. Everything is always so difficult.
Everything is almost possible.
This room is church.
At the end of the poem, the speaker envisions her daughter remembering this moment as a room of her own in future – exposing the irresistible pastime of poets and parents who can’t help turning the present into a memory, even while it’s still happening.
That incursion of past into present is especially strong in the collection’s moving central section about Napolitano’s deceased father, to whom the book is dedicated. Here the haunting starts explicitly, as the ghost of Salvador Dali appears on the lawn of the ‘bad neighbourhood’ hospice in which her father is dying. The poems that follow repeatedly try to pin the lost man down on the page, hedged about with loving particularities like the ‘four-by-four / with cigarette stubs and maps in the door’ in “Pork Chop”, or the ‘good whiskey; black coffee; a long meal out’ in “The Parade of Lost Fathers”.
Yet, over and over, the dead resist their conjuring, ‘never get[ting] past the front door’ (“Pork Chop”). In “My dead father tells me what heaven is like”, the slippery narrative refuses to be precise:
loose, but not unruly…
encouraged
but not mandatory…
you move without resistance
but there’s no floating.
In “I tell my dead father about being 41”, the speaker talks compulsively and without a response until the very last line. These poems are awash with a tender, unfillable longing that peaks as the man – and his daughter – watches and waits for his inevitable ‘horse to come in’.
Memory is not always a gentle haunting, and throughout this collection there are sharp edges that catch the reader unawares: the ‘oil slick escape route’ of a nightly drink in “Corking”, the helpless exhaustion of the speaker in “Creeper”, who almost tells a kind stranger that she is ‘also clinging on’, and the unsettling dream landscape in “The Man with the Leather Hat”.
There are real flashes of anger, too, in the sequence that returns compulsively to the woods, and to the wolves and men who lurk there. ‘A list exercise’ ironically downplays the ‘little indiscretions’ in which male violence hangs over the interaction like a pall, and the women are expected to know that ‘my body / is a body, is a problem’, and laugh. Even the hard-edged landscape conspires with the wolf against the speaker in the poem “Gristle”, its hostility clear in its ‘tree spikes bone bare’ and ‘high, thin clouds’.
In response, though, Napolitano offers not more hostility, but love, and a bittersweet awareness of the headlong rush of time. In ‘Even as this darkness is falling’, the speaker pauses a domestic task to ‘know I am folded into the shape/ that contains you the most’, and it’s these shapes of love that the reader is left with:
…in the late, sun-drenched midday we would plant the lily bulbs
in the soil that Stephen sieved for rubble, me digging holes with my big spade,
and you with your little green spade and dressed in the gardening apron that could wrap around twice.
(“I would give myself”)
Napolitano’s ability to combine evocative and delicate imagery with real rushes of feeling make this collection an unmissable read for 2026.