Singing From the Deep End by Rebecca Hart Olander.
CavanKerry Press, 2026. $18.

Reviewed by Amanda Auchter

Rebecca Hart Olander’s second collection of poems, Singing from the Deep End (CavanKerry Press, 2026), moves with the tidal logic of memory—advancing, receding, returning altered. Rooted in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the collection traces a life shaped by girlhood in the 1970s and ’80s, the intimacy of female friendship, the rupture of loss, and the inheritance of motherhood. Rather than a linear narrative, Olander constructs an emotional geography in which the speaker navigates shifting boundaries between self and other, past and present, body and sea. The result is a collection that privileges accumulation and resonance over chronology, allowing meaning to emerge through juxtaposition and return.

The opening poems situate the speaker within a vividly rendered girlhood shaped by cultural detail and social tension: “Popularity measured on the laces / of aqua Nikes— safety pins threaded / with beads” (“Balance Beam”). These details anchor the poems in a specific time and place, yet they also serve as entry points into broader questions of belonging. Identity emerges as both imposed and self-fashioned: “Snaggletooth girl. Strawberry blonde ringlets. Cowardly Lion girl” (“Girls. I Knew. I Was.”). The accumulation of these descriptors forms a catalogue of selves, revealing how girlhood is structured through comparison, performance, and exclusion.

At the same time, Olander introduces an undercurrent of resistance. In “Origin,” the speaker reimagines inherited narratives, declaring, “I’m ready to drop my basket, / take the other path, into the uncharted woods.” The gesture signals a refusal of prescribed roles and a movement toward self-definition. This resistance recurs throughout the collection, often grounded in the body’s knowledge rather than abstract assertion. In “On Learning to Say No,” agency is presented as a physical act: “I could do that, stand at the water’s edge, / feeling that emptying of sand under my soles, / making a decision with my body not to give in.” The ocean here is not merely metaphor but method, its pull and resistance mirroring the speaker’s negotiations with power, desire, and autonomy.

The second section of Singing from the Deep End, “The Jerica Poems,” mark a tonal and structural deepening, confronting the death of a close friend with restraint and clarity. Grief in these poems is not a singular event but an ongoing condition that reshapes time and daily life. In “Anniversary,” the speaker describes “clearing / your calendar, donating your clothes, / taking a scythe to your future,” a sequence that underscores the administrative and emotional labor of loss. The phrase “Not by myself, / but unaccompanied” articulates the isolating paradox of grief: the bereaved remain among others yet experience a profound singularity.

Olander’s language in this section is notably precise. In “Grief,” physical pain becomes a conduit for memory: “It throbbed like I’ve been whacked with / a shovel. It throbbed like Jerica’s passing.” The repetition collapses bodily and emotional pain, suggesting that grief resides in the body as much as in memory. Similarly, “Pandemic Mammogram” juxtaposes clinical procedure with intimate loss: “And it was, except my friend died / of what I was testing to detect.” The poem exposes how grief infiltrates even routine experiences, altering perception and heightening vulnerability.

The collection’s concluding section turns toward motherhood and the death of the speaker’s own mother, expanding its exploration of relational identity across generations. In “Carrying Lessons,” the image of Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead calf, becomes emblematic of maternal endurance: “This is what we do, / our young held in our skin, leaching, / calcium from bones, iron from blood / as we grow them.” Olander situates motherhood within a continuum of giving and letting go, emphasizing both its physical demands and emotional stakes. This complexity continues in “The Conception Immaculate,” where the speaker interrogates the values she has passed to her daughter: “I praised her goodness, but I should have / urged her to be wicked, told her how / gorgeous and glowing it is to be human.” The poem resists idealized notions of motherhood, presenting it instead as a site of ongoing self-reckoning.

Throughout the collection, the ocean functions as a central organizing presence, shaping both imagery and structure. In “Cape Ann,” the speaker asks, “Does the Atlantic recognize us in its mirror?” The question underscores the instability of identity, suggesting that the self is continually reshaped by time, experience, and relationship. This fluidity is echoed in the collection’s musicality, where repetition and variation create a rhythm that mirrors the movement of water.

If the collection has a limitation, it lies in its occasional reliance on associative movement at the expense of narrative clarity. Some poems resist coherence to such a degree that their emotional stakes become less immediate. Yet this disjunction also reflects the collection’s investment in memory and grief as nonlinear experiences. Rather than imposing order, Olander allows fragmentation to stand, trusting the reader to navigate its currents.

The final poem, “Telling the Bees,” offers a restrained and resonant conclusion. The speaker’s impulse to “tell the bees” of her mother’s death situates personal loss within a broader ecological and communal framework. The closing gesture—“I will lean into the end- / of-summer goldenrod, and listen”—suggests attention rather than resolution, an openness to what remains. Singing from the Deep End is a carefully crafted and affecting collection that examines womanhood, memory, and relational identity with clarity and lyric control. Olander’s work demonstrates how poetry can hold what resists resolution, offering a sustained meditation on loss, connection, and the shifting contours of the self. For readers of contemporary narrative and lyric poetry, this collection provides both intimacy and scope, rewarding close attention and lingering in its emotional aftercurrents.

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a contributing reviewer for Rhino and Indianapolis Review. She lives in Houston, TX.

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