Millie Tullis

The whispers of Tullis’s family dynamics, handed down in fragments and memories—who is named after whom, whose gravestone inscription denotes which relationships—become a riveting narrative that Tullis skillfully unfurls from poem to poem. Tullis’s female ancestors garden, sew, birth babies, and keep house, holding down the material realities while men theologize and missionize. 

Tullis shows how women’s care work both conceals and illuminates terrifying realities. Alice’s bone comb becomes the way Marthy is groomed, both literally and symbolically. Marthy’s act of darning her stepfather’s socks is imagined as one way the mother “lets” her daughter be drawn into this “black hole” (“Marthy,” 19)—her future marriage and the theological vortex that justifies the marriage. In the poemworld, a proxy for historical space, Marthy loses her voice and agency. The fallout of a choice that wasn’t Marthy’s to begin with is so damaging to the integrity of the familial fabric that Tullis is still deconstructing it generations later.

– Elizabeth Pinborough

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