Donna Lynch | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: Girls from the County by Donna Lynch

Girls from the County by Donna Lynch

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1947879478

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

The city and the country are not the only dangerous places for a woman, according to Donna Lynch’s Girls from the County. In these poems, girls create a permanent connection to their landscape through the memories of places that “want to kill you” and the tragic deaths that result from ignoring ghostly warnings.

Lynch depicts the county as a haunted setting where people continue to tell the stories of horrible events involving nameless women whose lives have been destroyed there or, conversely, whose names became famous only because of the grisly details of their death. These are old stories, but also current ones, which show that some things do stay the same and that the only thing between you and disaster might be, as Lynch tells us, the words of your wise grandmother who knows how to survive.

The county girl, as Lynch points out, soon realizes that what passes as tradition, ritual or symbol is darker than it seems and even darker when you trace it to its roots. Men play a big role in this hidden evil – of violence by the river, “animal screams” mixing with unidentified screams in the woods, and things known by county girls that can’t be proven in order to save them or get them the justice they deserve. Even ordinary parties are characterized as events where county girls are likely to be “devoured” by men.

There is an occult connection between these horrors and old parts of a county – old burial grounds, old home sites now vacant, old houses where someone might think there was “something” scary in the window, old quarries and old cars that might be hiding dead bodies, and even gatherings of women trying to use the dark arts to protect themselves or to take revenge, not knowing whether they are really unleashing even more destruction.

Lynch’s short, free verse poems that often read like prose narratives describe the county as a place where girls are held “in captivity” and want to escape, where the “beauty queen” finds out how her good looks are also a curse, and where people talk to you one day and disappear or abandon you the next. There are threats that make these girls stay silent about what they know, that warn them to avoid being “dramatic” by not making accusations without “evidence,” that cause them to be concerned about their safety if they are “pretty” or “sad” because being perceived in those ways opens them up to being targeted by a predator.

With menacing poem titles like “The Thing about Girls with Hammers” and “When the Cloud Comes for You,” a reference to a Dorothy in Oz who does not want to go home, Girls from the County depicts the county as a place where there is a barely contained fear, a lurking anxiety, a sense that every person, location, and situation is a potential threat to girls. In “Thirty-two Years (Eighteen Years Reprise)” the speaker worries, “What if / what we really saw / were all the things / we could not escape” and realizes that, ultimately, the “hurt” “waited for us in the trees,” and so, these girls have no choice but to run while the past always follows closely behind.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Book Review: Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

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.