Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-947879-12-6

Available: Paperback, Kindle

In the Afterword to Choking Back the Devil: Poems, Donna Lynch describes how the reader’s “immersion” in horror poetry can be “an ax right to the torso” and more intense than the horror fiction which she also writes. This poetry proves her right. Lynch has created nightmarish psychological landscapes full of emotional pain and torture and menacing nameless and faceless figures that are humans, monsters, and witches. Her words reveal monstrous truths like the real life horrors that are so bad we might want to believe they could only be fictional.

The central poems in this collection focus on capturing the trauma of torment in terrifying emotional detail. The poet keeps the spotlight on feelings rather than actions. There is despair here and a loss of faith, even in God, as well as symbolic images of mutilated internal organs and “hollowed” victims running in terror. In the most ghastly of these poems, the title poem, a body is invaded by the devil. As if that is not enough, Lynch does not spare the reader from imagining being the random victim of a callous human monster in the aptly named poem “It Just Wasn’t Your Night” and contemplating the chilling fate of each child in “Sacrifice” who is “chosen” to suffer in place of the rest. But, neither does she leave out those who turn their horrific memories into weapons, anger, and even a sisterhood of sorts as is the case in “Legend” and “Honey.”

Other poems move in different directions while maintaining the same emotional content. “If You Love Me” uses terrifying thoughts that a rational person might only think but never seriously enact to show how it feels when a victim of a manipulative love turns what should be doubt in someone else into self-doubt.  A clever little poem, “Wreckage,” uses a mirroring word effect in two stanzas to show alternative perspectives in a relationship, and “My Incomplete Children” makes one think of Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” with Lynch’s poems being the horror version since her poems, as she says, “have teeth.” And, indeed, they do. Highly Recommended

Contains: body horror, posssession, violence.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: Choking Back the Devil: Poems was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection.