Under Her Skin (2022) - Horror Poetry Book Review

Under Her Skin is an anthology poetry book edited by Lindy Ryan and Toni Miller. As everyone knows a good anthology needs a good theme, and in addition to every one of the roughly eighty seven (!) poems being written by women (cis and trans) and non-binary women, they also share a theme of body horror. I received this for review in October of last year, to be honest I don't know what I was thinking as I really don't get on with poems. They tend to drain me the same way attempting to do a jigsaw puzzle or crossword puzzle does.

The trouble with taking body horror as a theme is that a whole bunch of these felt like very similar variations on a theme. A large swath of these deal with people who are self mutilating themselves for various reasons. These destructive tendencies range from milder self harm like cutting themselves with a razor blade, to completely removing all their limbs and organs. That isn't to say these poems are boring, there are some here that even I appreciated. The best of the mutilation ones for me was Amanda Kirby's Sanctification that was so simple in form yet so effective. Smile by Nico Bell was another good one, a character who takes a drastic response to being told to cheer up. Self mutilation is such a common theme here, body horror often touches on a warped view of the self. From the amount of poems of this type it appears this is one of the key issues faced. Reading or watching films by females I never notice that strong of a difference, here though, poetry feels so much more intimate, the poems all feel like they are from a female perspective.

In anthology books I nearly always talk about each story in turn, of course I'm not going to do that when there are so many poems. I made brief notes on the ones that stood out the most. Outside In by Dalena Storm was one of the only poems which rhymes. It shows how little I read poetry as I thought most poems rhymed, rather than the other way around. I discovered that it is more how lines interact with each other, how well the various sentences interact with each other to give a satisfying cadence and flow. 

A lot of the poems here are more abstract in what is happening but there are some which tell little tales. Brianna Malotke's Lovely Like Honey was like a dark fairytale about a creature who lured children in with lovely stories. Then there is the excellent Zombification by Roni Stinger about the Cordyceps fungus affecting a human, another zombie based one, Lillies Left For Mom (Malotke again) has a woman waking up within the grave. Growing Pains by Amy Lowenstern was all about the horror of growing older, how it never turns out like you expect it will..
There were a couple of writers whose names I recognised, such as Mercedes M. Yardley's (Beautiful Sorrows) It Hurts When I Breathe who writes about the anger that grows inside when insulted for being a woman, and Cassondra Windwalker (Hold My Place) with These Men Are All One Monster.

With themes of negative self image, abusive relationships, the horrors of getting old and striving for artificial perfection there became a lot more variation than what the first third or so of the collection included. With each poem at most three pages long (typically one to two pages in length) I zoomed through this, perhaps not giving as much attention as I should have done. As I said at the start though, I appreciate poetry but it really isn't for me, regardless I didn't have too bad of a time reading Under Her Skin.

SCORE: