In the berry takes the shape of the bloom, andrea bennett crafts a poetry of undoing and tying back together, an archive of feeling that is carefully rendered in fragments and ruptures. In well-wrought prose stanzas, bennett explores loss alongside its antipode: new life, figured through encroaching light, in prickly fruit, in unfurled ferns, and in the embryonic gestation of a fetus, “sunny side up.” Desire, queer pregnancy and parenting, embodiment, intimacy, and grief all recur gently throughout as bennett’s speaker “argue[s] with the idea of” their mother as their body becomes “soft like a cushion.”

The collection offers no titles and no structural scaffolding, but instead, unfolds as a sequence of scenes and observations that coalesce around recurrence rather than resolution. Loss is not the conclusion here, but the terrain: “We are learning a lesson,” one poem reads, that “with object permanence comes the pain of loss.” This is a statement of emotional physics; what persists also wounds, and what blooms also wilts.

Meaning accrues slowly, surely, deliberately through repetition: images of slides, doorways, fruit, the mother’s shadowed presence. They return not as refrains, but as haunted sites of re-engagement. This is a collection where memory is felt less as total recall than as ambient vibration, where pain is not narrated but enacted in the syntax of return. “Did I berry?” the speaker asks, then backs up to explain what they mean: “You can say that what you want is to hold a space that isn’t fixed. You can say that’s what you want but someone is always there to tell you the bloom is what comes before the berry.” Their poems linger in the moment before definition: when form is still unsettled, when sweetness and decay exist in the same gesture. Fruit becomes metonymy for the body, for identity, for grief—always in excess, always threatening to burst.

Parenthood surfaces throughout as both presence and erasure. As bennett intimates, to become parent is to inhabit “[t]he feeling of being half a compound noun.” The speaker wrestles with what it means to parent while being parented imperfectly. The poems do not resolve these tensions—they hold them.

What holds these shifting registers together is bennett’s tonal control: moments of sharp pain nestle beside flashes of wit, tenderness alongside fatigue. This is a poetics of what Lauren Berlant might call “the impasse” of living through and within unresolved durations, living in a holding pattern, a stretch of time marked by intensity without event, a period of suspension between what has happened and what has not yet found its form. An impasse of grief, an impasse of life.

the berry takes the shape of the bloom does not offer narrative, closure, or catharsis. What it offers instead is a meditation of intimate survival—one that lingers in what cannot yet be resolved and asks what else might take shape in that refusal. “Together,” they write near the close of the book, “we can make an island loop.” That sounds like a life.