What the Current Cannot Swallow by Debra Hall
Publication date: December 15, 2025
Language: English
Softcover / e-Book: 43 pages
Genre: Poetry (Chapbook)
ISBN: 9781997737056 Paperback
ASIN: 9781997737063 e-Book
Reviewed by: Lisa Lickel
A fulfilling experience
When the dedication is a twist of joy, you know you’re in for a fulfilling experience.
Readers join the author in a fugue of exhaustion as a couple experiences medical crisis in the opening poems: “she (the case worker) warns me not to be so dark,” the author shares in “Flight Risk”; and “the hospital staff is anxious / for us to go home,” she writes in “A Welcome Overstayed.” The twenty-three prose poems set mostly in couplets and short stanzas tumble love and worry across the page. Many of the poems follow the experiences of filling last dreams of travel; revelation; desperation for healing as in the poem “Sacrament,” which holds the title line; and prayers for “a little more time” in “La Pieta.” A muse about how life might have been different made me smile when the author hints living in my hometown of Racine in “Danish Kringle,” with its “chewy almond paste” that persuaded “us to stay.”
Both the dignity of death and indignity of well-meaning advice when “the social worker had / confused the order of magnitude / prepared me for the aftershock / not the blast” poignantly remind us that death is a unique experience. A dribble of peace comes through in “Legacy” where the author promises to keep Grandpa’s memory: “we will find your spirit there / and he will know your name Grandpa.”
The poem that spoke to me most was “Bear Bells,” in which the author grabs an experience to hold: “I try to remember why I / agreed to a trip more rugged / than romantic, yet saw a chance / to map your wilderness, find / a branch that holds the things you / guard under tooth and claw.”
What the Current Cannot Swallow is a beautiful tribute to a precious partner whose “spirit dances in ripples” and is truly immortalized.
The well-done prose poems will resonate with those who keep memory alive.
