Reduction Fired by Jennifer Yeates Camara is a collection of the author's original poetry. The pieces are broken down by season and each falls into a category of summer, winter, spring, or autumn and is fuelled in intervals from one to the next as alliteration to the seasons of life. The poems are written primarily in free verse with a heavy emphasis on poetic dissonance that punches through the stanzas. They also vary in length with pieces such as the simply titled XXXIV, a poem written as a traditional three-line tercet, to others like the poem Medusa that retain the quality of compressed stanzas but the verses as a whole span multiple pages.

Poetry is often difficult to review because, unlike books, the artform is almost completely subjective. As a poetess, Jennifer Yeates Camara is a Jackson Pollock of her craft. Reduction Fired unapologetically pushes forward constructive chaos in a beautiful and deeply emotional written form of the abstract expressionist movement. My favorite is The Youngest, a piece that hints at the bitter-sweetness of guardianship and, in its final season, a reflection of the hope and duty entrusted to a soul—a parent—but also the pressure placed to groom the next generation. Lines such as “When I’ve set out ideals, by words imperfect and divine” highlight the fallibility of parenting and the hope that our children will stand on their own. This is a wonderful compilation that provokes a great deal of thought. Highly recommended.

So many things in life parallel art: music, the visual arts, dance and theatre, and, yes, poetry. The power of the written word, freely expressed, can expound so much about life, love, and the meager human existence. But, the written word can also lean heavily on the other arts to make its expressive tone vibrantly clear and allow the reader to reflect intensely on what is being shared.

Canadian poet Jennifer Yeates Camara is multi-talented in the arts and her poetry reflects the power behind the creative mind. In her collection of poems, Reduction Fired, the reader is immersed in metaphors of light and sound reflective of music, from the music of songbirds to the music of the rippling waters that surround her. She uses references to an ominous bird, the karasu, oft misnamed as a crow or a raven or even a blackbird, and another Japanese bird, the hototogisu, which might be like a cuckoo or a wood thrush with a strong, mournful cry, also often referred to as “the bird of disappointed love.” There are scholarly reflections, too: references to ancient civilizations, like the oldest community of Nineveh. There is even a poem that reflects on the painting “White Pine” by the famous Canadian artist, A.J. Casson: “Here, nothing is as it seems/ crisp, stark and sculptured/ leans a windblown tree/ …/ Reaching for the tree of life/ I search the naked structure/ nothing, it seems, is there.” (I think this was my favorite poem in the collection.)

Using free verse and haiku, Jennifer Yeates Camara clearly demonstrates the power of the written word and the reflective nature of interweaving creative thoughts like a fine tapestry on multiple levels. The poet mostly writes about nature, but there is considerable depth in her poems than mere excursions through the beautiful natural world around her home on the west coast of Canada. Her jottings are deeply immersed in her upbringing, her life, and her ability to see the world creatively and to appreciate it for all its beauty. She is an artist on many levels. Reduction Fired is a stunning, provocatively pensive collection of poems and photographs to enjoy many times over.

Reduction Fired: Poems by Jennifer Yeates Camara is a collection of poems that celebrate the cycle of life. It is divided into four parts: Winter, Autumn, Summer, and Spring. The poems feature a wide range of themes, including nature, sound and silence, inner peace, growth, spirituality and contemplation, family and friendship, solitude, loneliness, and many more. The poems are short and each captures a moment that is well-defined, an emotion that is strongly felt, an idea forming in the poet’s mind in the hushed hours of the day, observations of life evolving around the personae, and much more.

Jennifer Yeates Camara has a unique poetic style, and the short sentences accentuate the fast rhythm of her poetic utterances. Reduction Fired: Poems features exquisite imagery, and the author’s evocative style combines with the deft use of metaphors to give depth and perspective to the poems, allowing the themes to be clearly communicated to the reader. An example of a metaphor that is brilliantly used is in “Flying,” a poem that describes a heart that is peaceful and lively, like the child running “arms full span / Wanting others to come to feel this, / They look up, sadly, mouthing ‘loner.’” The reader can’t help but notice the irony in the message, and it is in the denial from those the poor heart reaches out to, exuberantly, that the author communicates the loneliness. Reduction Fired: Poems is a gorgeous offering for fans of poetry, and the collection will entice readers and remind them of some of the emotions and experiences they have as humans. It is rich in the humanity it evokes, creative in the seasons it explores, and inspiring in the profusion of life it celebrates.

Reduction Fired is a collection of contemporary poetry penned by Jennifer Yeates Camara. The collection is a diverse set of poems spanning 25 years of the poet’s work, utilizing a variety of influences from across the globe to create an eclectic mix of meditations primarily formed in a focused and reduced format. Whilst the poems mainly focus on exploring the dynamics of different relationships, there are several that focus on events personal to the poet’s life such as her upbringing in poverty, the loss of a close friend to suicide, and her partner’s struggle with addiction.

It takes a lot of skill as a creative person to be able to turn the darker parts of your life and experience and create something beautiful with it. By focusing her form so that a few simple words bring a whole world to the imagination, Jennifer Yeates Camara sets herself apart as a contemporary poet. There is a curiosity and reflection about her work, a need inspired in the reader to take what has been written and expand upon it in their own mind and apply it to their own experiences. A great deal of growth and reflection is shown by the poems collected in Reduction Fired, with the poet using the exercise of reduction to consider her life and the events within it so that they can be conjured in a reader’s mind in the fewest words necessary. A collection of works from a poet of great skill and imagination, I recommend this collection to all.