The poems in Any Other Branch are grouped into four sections; representing developmental stages of life. The stages are grand leaps, rather than small steps or divisions of time. They are emotional groupings based on the way each poem ties into the next and the section’s over-arching theme. Ivy Page employs a philosophical approach to the psychology of  human response. She explores the world through different perspectives, lending each poem emotional, moral, and intellectual depth.

“Nothing, lately, from my kitchen / tastes as sweet as ink,” declares Ivy Page, and in brief lyrics that are humorous and sensual (“Like the warm lick across my thigh / when you come to bed early”), she balances that sweetness with an irreverent tang to allay her spiritual hunger: “Give me light in the world gone dark in the center / of some black rose, some angelic tar pit.” Any Other Branch is a book of such sly surfaces that often reveal surprising depths.          

These poems are short and quick, but of great consequence, like bullets. The language here is filled with roosters and diets and radiators that simply refuse to let go. I love the directness of Ivy Page’s tone in this work, how “Dogs hang in my throat trying to push past my heart,” as she writes, and how a “Man knows how to dress / like a woman, not in women’s clothes.” Indeed. Any Other Branch reminded me of early work by a brilliant contemporary Irish poet Rita Ann Higgins—in how these lines punch (“birds wear headphones/ in your dreams. Their limbs are fat.”) and how they stand up for one woman’s voice, and how they laugh (“Jesus ate my Buick, so I might have to walk / miles to find these parts”) out loud, in a full voice, unafraid.                

Any Other Branch is a collection that’s both incredibly grounded, and also filled with psychological urgency. The poems originate in the personal, but extend effortlessly into the deeply universal, showcasing a fine and original imagination, and humanity to spare.                                            

author of Stumble, Gorgeous and the New York Times Best Seller, The Paris Wife

With “children dancing in ginger spiced corridors,” a pumpkin lover “glowing / with the light I gave,” and “wooden men who dance / on boards with dowels sticking out / of their backs,” Ivy Page populates a lush and surreal world. It’s a world full of ‘branches’—of crossroads, choices and consequences rendered in sensual, sometimes surprising language and imagery.                     

author of Luck and A Thirst That's Partly Mine

If I knew that those Sunday-school stories I heard would become 

               a ball of uncertainty rolling around inside me, 

if my parents hadn’t kicked me out for dating the youth pastor wannabe, 

               and I hadn’t moved in with the married lesbian.

If the married lesbian hadn’t decided to divorce her husband

               I wouldn’t have ended up living in Athens, Georgia where

I would, in the span of a week discover that my boyfriend was

               cheating on me, miscarry our baby, and get mugged.

If I hadn’t moved in with my ex-boyfriend’s mother after that

               and then in with a distant cousin in Milledgeville, Georgia

where I would find my perceptions altered by practicing the loss 

               of time through smoke and mushrooms, multiple partners

and practicing being Good Enough* at karaoke. Or if my drinking buddy 

               hadn’t said that the guy running the karaoke night

was gay, so that I challenged — I would bet her a beer that I could

               get him in the sack, and if he hadn’t asked for my 

number that same night only to tear it up a week later because I turned him

               down because I was still only seventeen and wouldn’t be

let into the bar where he wanted to take me dancing.  And if the drummer

               in the band I sang for hadn’t done twelve shots of white 

lightning the following New Year’s and then urinated on me in bed because 

               he was in diabetic shock, and if I hadn’t covered the shift

delivering pizzas for the girl I worked with, and if I hadn’t gone 

               to the party, where the guy that ran karaoke 

read poetry, and I sang bad imitations of Janis Joplin—

               then I wouldn’t have ended up in place of eight month snows,

married ten years to the guy that ran karaoke, and I wouldn’t be watching our 

               two children recreating games of hopeful daisy chains, and 

animal clouds. And if we had chosen any other branch?

* “Good Enough” Sarah McLachlan

** After W.S. Merwin’s “One of the Lives” 

Copyright © Ivy Page 2013

Although Any Other Branch is Ivy Page’s debut collection, her work is already much anthologized and is well-published in numerous respected journals. Additionally, she is the founder and editor of Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine. Perhaps tellingly, her dedication to “my best beloved, Stephen & for my girls …” opens up a highly moving and, in parts, very personal book.

The collection is divided into four parts: “Men”, “Room”, “Girl” and “High Tide”. the first section is announced with confidence, quoting from T.S.Eliot’s The Hollow Men. Unsurprisingly then, the poetry which follows is modernist in its use of language and sparing with its punctuation. Indeed, in some of the poems such marks are entirely absent. Consider “Soldiers”, which is completely devoid of the conventional grammatical mechanisms of pause and stop. This results in verse very able to convey the eternal nature of war and aggression. Contrastingly, “See” (in “Girl”) is short and iconic, with inbuilt, punctuated reflective spaces. Indeed, Page’s creative use of punctuation is a feature throughout; a spectacularly successful example of the poet’s ability to combine the lexical and grammatical in a concrete, purposeful way. The brevity and force of Page’s verse is striking and the effect upfront, in keeping with the stark and uncompromising imagery. “Male Seeking” is bitter-sweet funny and sexy, structured as an advertisement, but with a hard, verbal left hook at the worst of the hollowness of men:

    breasts that could be

    compared to hard whipped

    egg whites –

Even in her darkest moments – in “Death Call” and in “Roosters”, there is a straightforwardness, and intrinsic integrity, describing death in a way which is both personal and universal. The latter bows out with the succinct “You can only have one rooster”.

“Room” has a humour and a sensuousness largely absent from the first section – from the soft flow of “honey” and “suckle” in “Word Diet” to the powerfully erotic “Twice Baked Cunnilingus” … all “essence”, “creamy”, “smoky” and “melody” rich. Enjoy, too, this section’s rhythms, rhymes and image-dense alliterative qualities. In “Insanity”, for example, we hear “padded walls, prickle”, “freckle my face” and “shake-down, drown-out”. Many of these poems are in the first person, even when the themes are huge.”Rock and Flesh” illustrates the exploration of the personal in tandem with the contemplation of the cosmos –

    Calm comes as I imagine the woman

    in her wicker clicking in rhythm

    with the ocean wave; rhythm that moves us…

The third section, “Girl”, is broken into numbered, defining titles, such as “6.Hand” and “3.At 14”. These titles are short – sometimes only a single word long – and the poems themselves are correspondingly brief. The subjects and style are extraordinarily intimate, and there are some very well-nuanced return volleys to some of the earlier poems in “Men”.

The title page quotation of “High Tide”, “all I want is a human window/in a house whose roof is my life” (Ilya Kaminsky, from Marina Tsvetaeva), is illuminating and here we have the greatest variety of subject, style, stanzaic form and atmosphere. Compare the immediacy of “Tribute”, with its short couplets, to the prose poem format of “Compost”. Warmth, humour and intense observation run through all of these poems. Page conveys not only deeply personal moments, often with surreal touches, but also the eternal, universal aspects of humanity, which she is equally adept at unveiling.

If any poem can be said to give the flavour of the book, it may be ”Blessings” in this final grouping – a neat, balanced and rhythmic poem which is all at once laser sharp and engaging.

    Give me light in the world gone dark in the center

    of some black rose, some angelic tar pit,[…]

This is an exquisite collection, warm, womanly, timeless and thought-provoking; challenging and enlightening poems for all – and thoroughly recommended.