This Side of The River by Ilyssa Forman

This Side of the River is Ilyssa Forman's debut chapbook and takes readers on a journey through landscapes of grief, using the natural world and built environment of New York City as prisms and guides for understanding the speaker's internal state. The chapbook focuses primarily on a break-up and its aftermath as the speaker reckons with the emotional abuse and infidelity that she experienced.

In This Side of the River, the poet and the natural world are mirrors of one another, reflecting the constancy of change and the passage of time. As the moon waxes and wanes, the speaker traverses through different temporal and emotional states, moving in circles rather than in one clear direction. These poems are a meditation on the nonlinear forms that trauma-processing and healing can take in our lives. This Side of the River forges landscapes of grief with fire and water, the earth and moon, a former lover's eyes, New York's cityscape, and wild animals at all stages of life and death.