Book Review: Passion and Provocation

Reviewed by S.A. Evans

From girlhood to womanhood to motherhood and back again—a raw and genuine poetry collection through a reflective lens

Passion & Provocation is simultaneously intimate and universal, both relatable and wholly the self. It’s a personal story with its own past, memories, and present that informs our own everyday lives. While each of its nine parts focuses on its own subject, they interconnect often—a fluid and deeply moving final product.

In “The Beginning,” the speaker sits down to write and gets lost in reading. In “Domestic Themes,” we bask in the simple things like our time with family. In “Longings,” we feel the pining, yearning, and uncertainty associated with love, while“Love,” dives into the reality of a relationship: the good, the bad, how we fall and why we might hold onto it when we should let it go. 

But there is also an ending to love here and how it can affect you. “Memories” places us in the past to inform our present, while “Spiritual Contemplations” discusses life, God, and Death. Then we close with “Tributes,” which shouts out influential people in the speaker’s life. It’s all so specific, but so relevant to so many of us. The specificity is what sets it apart and makes it applicable.

The balance between lighthearted moments of the everyday and heavier subjects of specific times is executed extremely well in Passion and Provocation. We float through the rhythm of the collection, and we’re along for quite a ride. It’s a difficult balance that Partelow handles with great care.

Partelow handles things on the line-level exceptionally well too. We venture through some lovely alliteration—“petals pressed between pages,” “smooth stones skimmed”—and some deeply meaningful turns of phrase, whether about love or heartbreak—from “If glances were currency / I’ve spent a fortune on your face” to “I wonder where you’ve gone / why you don’t call, what I did, or said / to make you go?”

With a collection as big as this one—100+ poems spanning over 200 pages—we’re bound to run into some that fall flat and some that shine. In some poems, we don’t dive deep enough, while others meaning is difficult to come by. I also ran into a couple of uncomfortable racial moments, like using “Siddhartha eyes,” when race or ethnicity doesn’t play a role in a large majority of the collection.

Passion & Provocation lives up to its name. The human experience is full of passion, pain, longing, loss, gratitude, and exploration of the self—this book is too. There are times when we might feel nothing and other times where we feel everything all at once. This collection is like a guiding hand for the confusing, difficult, and everyday. There’s a little something for everyone here.

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