The Four Faces of Eve: A Tribute to Survival (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781952232930)

Though Constance E. Boyle, Brooke Granville, Petra Perkins and Gail Waldstein have different faces, personalities, and life experiences, they all share qualities implied by the name, "Eve," a word with roots in "life" and "breath." They have worked together as poets for many years, each distilling her own life experiences and helping the others to hone poems which pay tribute to resilience, love, survival and spirit in a world where abuse, betrayal, death and grief are also deeply rooted.

Constance E. Boyle is a lifelong creative writer with an MFA from Goddard. She spent most of her career working at Denver Health as a physician assistant in pediatric and adolescent medicine. Along the way, she facilitated an improv theater for youth and published prize-winning poetry. Her seventeen poems in The Faces of Eve recreate the terrifying experience of a child whose abuser approaches ("attic"), the wry self-assertion of a woman who rejects sexism ("dance 101"). Her Eve accepts her own bipolar disorder ("I'll tell you bipolar"); she dances, kayaks, grieves the death of her mother, watches in bemused delight as her children grow ("mom, you'll love this").

Brooke Granville's path begins with family tangles. Adopted as an infant by a couple who afterwards divorced, she was "part of three families ... before [she] was five." After her own early divorce, she spent her career in real estate. She began writing poetry largely as a way of engaging with specific traumas: spousal abuse, divorce and its after-effects. But her Eve's scope is broad; her twenty-two poems come from decades full of challenges, sometimes met with hesitation, often with success, always with memorable images. Granville writes with clear love about her children, with hope about her second marriage, with unforgettable understatement about her son's suicide ("my son's chair" and "the oh of suicide"), and with gentle spirit about eventually finding her birth mother and a newly extended family.

Petra Perkins, with degrees in Computer Engineering, Aerospace Management, and Creative Writing, is probably the most widely published in this talented foursome, with poems, stories, and essays in The Huffington Post, The Colorado Independent, Rumpus, and even The New York Times. She wrote for Crone Magazine for several years and, with her race-car-driving husband, co-authored Full Circle: A Hands-On Affair with the First Ferarri 250 GTO. Her sixteen poems in The Four Faces of Eve are often filled with laughter. One hears it as she imitates a sexist male ("The Interview") or remembers a tasty affair ("Chili in Winter"). Her Eve has known abuse ("In the Closet") and lost loved ones ("Here and Away"). Yet empathy is the deepest quality in Perkins' poems, empathy which enables the poet to become other selves, to see that some "need solace/ faith magic/ or/ hope" ("Celestial").

Gail Waldstein's experiences with Eve (life's breath) are complex and unique. The first three of her eighteen poems recreate her Eve's breath-stopping fear of a sexually abusive "Daddy." Other poems place her own children--supple and fragile--within a failing marriage, herself deposited in a mental institution. Others speak to her survival and that of her children ("aurora"), But it's poems about her work as a pediatric pathologist that most fully immerse readers in a world where pain feels universal and grief inevitable ("prayer for the light baby"). Waldstein's poetry refuses to simplify or romanticize.

Taken together, Boyle, Granville, Perkins and Waldstein give their women readers memorable tributes to (1) shared pain; (2) complicated love; (3) motherhood; (4) resilience; (5) grief; and (6) an enduring and empathetic spirit.