<i>Cinnamon Fire</i> (Sheila Black) - Wordgathering

Reviewed by Liz Whiteacre

Sheila Black’s latest poetry collection, Cinnamon Fire (Next Page Press, 2026), leans into the aubade, a form that historically welcomes dawn and laments the parting of lovers, to explore the speaker’s rumination on relationships and how they shape us. Readers are introduced to an unrequited love who is woven into the late nights of the speaker’s young adulthood, juxtaposed with a husband who keeps her grounded, safe, and cared for in the present day. Haunted by things left unsaid and unpursued, the speaker fears she is less present and available to people now—more alone—while ultimately recognizing that presence requires an acceptance of our physical and emotional architectures.

In past collections, Black’s speakers made me feel we must resist the urge to retroactively “fix” a life or a body in favor of embracing the self and trying to find equilibrium between who we are and who we want to be—a person we can live with and share with others. Cinnamon Fire invites readers into liminal moments when our past and present selves blur in contemplation and regret threatens to swallow us. It helps us reflect on the people who have shaped who we are but are no longer with us, forcing us to consider how their spectral impact continues to influence the choices we make and the way we love and move through the world. In “The Coming World,” the speaker shares:

On the hot longwalk, I ask imaginary you
what you think of this. I ask you in this poem,
knowing full well—We go on. We get lonelier,
give up even those who feel as necessary to us
as salt. (p. 46)

The speaker acknowledges that the person she imagines and speaks with internally is not really the man she once knew and loved, yet the process of continuing a conversation with him after his death helps her process the loss. In a way, it is her own Cinnamon Fire, like the gloss coating lips “as if that were some legitimate form of protection” from “our secret shames” (“The Earth,” 36). The speaker tells a woman who wears the lip gloss and “just turned fifty” to “wait ten years—you/ won’t know more, but you will get closer to forgiving/ because it is all happening on a wheel that spins so fast” (“The Earth,” 36). She suggests to this lunch companion that they should explore “wonder,” because it can help them carry their “lonely fear that [their] children won’t find their way” (“The Earth,” 36), a fear that is echoed in the women’s own hearts for themselves. This conversation with two women brought together by work who chat over lunch reminds us everyone carries secret shames, unrequited loves, unfulfilled desires—and the imagery of the fiery lip gloss presenting a mask of confidence is an excellent metaphor for the collection: what the speaker shares with people as she moves through her day is a veneer. And this veneer, reflecting a persona of the speaker, hides insecurities, fear, and regret under its surface.

We have much to learn from Black’s vulnerability. Her narrative arc encourages readers to face midlife transitions and regrets, whether we welcome or fear them, and choose a path of resilience—one that acknowledges that life is fleeting, unpredictable, and far too short to pull back out of fear. One of forgiveness. When we do, it changes us irrevocably and we realize “Sometimes we feel as distant / as continents but really we are like the / ocean beneath, full of large animals sending / signals across the cold blue waters” (“Letter in Spring,” 41). Tuning into these signals helps us “unpack [our] chests of memory” (“Afterlife,” 55) and consider what serves us and what does not.

I found the narrative threads in Black’s collection to be compelling and highly recommend this collection to poets developing their craft and collections. Black structures Cinnamon Fire across thematic movements associated with times of day and the spirit of the aubade:

Poems introduce us to the speaker’s relationship with “you,” the person the speaker loved deeply and complexly as they entered adulthood. These poems center around nighttime activities in rough neighborhoods, dawn, and memories that expose raw pain, potential, and missed opportunities, as in “Predator” or “Alphaville.”
Poems grounded firmly in the waking present show us the speaker waking early, walking the neighborhood, gardening, and engaging with people and environments that teach her about living with her choices, as in “August,” “Unrequited,” or “How We Live.” These offer us a window into both the stable world the speaker has built with her husband and her ongoing internal dwelling on you’s influence on her life and chronic pain’s (and heartache’s) affects on her day-to-day body.
Poems explore myths that allow the speaker to explore longing and lonliness—such as meditations on Medea and Orion—to examine how heartache shapes our humanity, as in “Medea by the Water’s Edge” and “Elegy with Orion.”

Black deftly braids these threads of the speaker’s story in Cinnamon Fire, and I admired her structural agility—particularly her use of stark, haunting couplets to balance grief and desire in pieces like “At Times Presence Is a Kind of Wound” and “Heartbreak,” which also visually remind me of the couples at the different phases of the speaker’s life:

At times presence is a kind of wound—
to sit under the catalpa tree

in the blue-black noon and hear
the buzzing of insect legs.

Where were you meant to go? The dead don’t answer,
but leave divinations, clues. (“At Times Presence Is a Kind of Wound,” p. 22)

…

I forgot that, as ice breaks, even the sharpest
desire can break,

leaving one person holding the shards.
The figure with her spilled goblets. She should

bend over and pick them up, but this is art
where nothing happens— (“Heartbreak,” p. 25)

Black anchors emotions in concrete details and gestures, which helps us better understand what the speaker is wrestling with. She also uses a collage framework in “Cento for Us” to stitch together a tapestry of insights from Melissa Kwasny and Jenny Browne’s poems, which in addition to the allusions to Medea and Orion in myth and Lousie Nevelson’s “Nightscape V.,” offers readers connections to vivid landscapes and nightscapes outside the speaker’s internal and external worlds. These poems that turn outward effectively break tensions building inside the speaker. Black’s attention to figurative language is immensely satisfying. She establishes a vivid environment built on the physical tension between morning and night, utilizing sharp personifications of landscapes where the desert and the weather mirror spiritual and bodily transformations throughout the collection.

The aubade, identified in four poems’ titles, helps keep readers suspended in the twilight of waking—the fragile boundary where the night and the morning bleed into one another and we are strongly connected to our ghosts. In poems like “Aubade for Losers” and “Aubade for the City that Never Sleeps,” Black plays with folklore and literary history, reminding us that dawn has long been a strict “curfew” for spirits—a moment when supernatural power fades and the world is cleansed. Yet, in these poems, the ghosts of memory don’t fully dissipate; they linger in the morning light, haunting the domestic spaces of gardens and kitchen sinks. The speaker has internal commentary with the man who meant so much in her youth, during which she recognizes that the person she talks to and remembers (this person who’s been a touchstone her adult life) is a construct of her own making. Readers will connect, I feel, with this practice of seeking counsel from and exploring “what ifs” in internal dialogues with memories. Don’t we all talk to the dead? To people from our past who are no longer in our lives? Analyze and re-vision those moments we disappointed them or ourselves?

This collection is worth several reads. I learned so much regarding the mechanics of craft: I highly recommend that poets and teachers bring this text into their creative writing practice and classrooms. More than a lesson in form, though, Cinnamon Fire offers a beautiful study of rumination that is familiar and extraordinary. It shows us how regrets can easily eat away at us and leave us hollow, permeating the present world and defining who we are, while teaching us, line by line, how to trace what there is left to love and embrace.

Title: Cinnamon Fire
Author: Sheila Black
Publisher: Next Page Press
Date: 2026

Read a review of It Could Account for the Panic by Liz Whiteacre in this issue of Wordgathering.

About the Reviewer

Liz Whiteacre is the author of Hindsight 20/40, it could account for the panic, and Hit the Ground. Her poems have appeared in Wordgathering, Disability Studies Quarterly, Breath and Shadow, and other publications, including the anthologies, Every Place on the Map is Disabled and An Indiana Christmas. She co-edited the anthology Monday Coffee & Other Stories of Mothering Children with Special Needs with Darolyn Jones. Whiteacre is a Professor of English at the University of Indianapolis.