Red Promises

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Halli Villegas, an American immigrant who now lives in Woodville,
Ontario, writes primarily about desire and the body. The speaker in the
poems is perhaps too preoccupied with her own physical attractiveness,
leaving the reader a little ill at ease at such narcissism. But the
poems are appealing in their sharp, sensuous language. Villegas is a
formalist and many of her poems are rhymed. She even writes a sestina,
“Minor Miracles,” which manages to tell a story, no easy task in
this heavily constrained form. As in much neoformalist poetry, the use
of traditional forms does not prevent the poems from occasionally
lapsing into flatness. Nevertheless, the book is an excellent debut.