Review by By Susan L. Leary
“What is my / True utterance?” asks the speaker in “Drawbridge + Moat,” the opening poem of Natalie Louise Tombasco’s Milk for Gall, which sets the stage for this deeply enchanting, linguistically spry, and pleasure-rich rush of girl vitality hell bent on outsmarting the pervasive misogyny of our culture and building a voice, and kingdom, of her own. The early image of the drawbridge and moat is apt, mirroring the fine line a girl must tread in navigating the patriarchy. She must be sufficiently guarded from the external forces that teach her to “perform” her gender while also close enough to these forces to understand them. Even the most dramatic moments of defiance can be a function of the gaze. “It’s all over // For you hoes when / I mix Glory into / My night cream—devastate thine enemies,” but this cheeky articulation of power is pure spectacle, tied to her animation on an imaginary stage. Eventually the speaker catches on: “So much of a girl’s time / is spent / pruning, waiting for someone to come eat her. So much of a girl’s time is spent being / a catalyst / for sin in silk & fringe,” an insight that sets in motion the eternal question of the collection: how to guarantee a girl is the subject of her own narrative and not the inspiration for someone else’s?
Fittingly, Milk for Gall unfolds across three “realms”: concrete realm, spindle realm, and bulb realm. The concrete realm is lush and sensual, hyper-focused on the body, featuring an assortment of female characters who are risqué, self-indulgent, and prone to fits of ennui. In “Lust-Drunk,” the speaker describes her experience of eating a mango with the edgiest language: “…I probed the ripe / skin with a dirty butter knife. I felt for tenderness, / never asked consent for its nakedness. Felt for / a brief moment as if I were Jeffrey Dahmer…” Here, she is unapologetic, graphic, a little violent, but throughout this realm, emotions are pendulous, and she is also capable of complacency. In “Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights,” for example, she laments that “[t]his garden, its blues, greens, browns, goes on / delighting—the sparrow keeps giving her all, stirring song // with paint, but paradise has gone tasteless as a stick of Juicy Fruit,” and in “Shitshow Barbie,” she complicates her use of extremes, commenting on the female anatomy with an exaggerated humor that is half compassion, half agitation:
Mattel, bless her with resting bitch face, nippleless breasts, lady parts bare
as those of the little girls who play with her. Bless her with an accessory kit
of Xanax smoothies, anal bleach, a Limited Edition Jade EggTM & booklet calledHow-To Clear Bad Juju from Your Yoni. Bless her with pointed feet
on yellow subways nubs. Shitshow Barbie does Kegels on the 1 Train!
Yes, praise Barbie for making the most of her condition by leaning into a sexist paradox that values her for her body but shames her if she is too sexual or indulgent: “Pitiful, really, to go at a mango, ravenously…,” the speaker scolds, and at the end of “Shitshow Barbie,” there is genuine sadness when she asks, “…why did you manufacture me this way?”
The conditioning of the concrete realm anticipates the more abstract, introspective explorations of the spindle realm, where the speaker considers the compounding relationship between her societal and familial inheritances. The mother figure dominates this realm, serving as a foil to the would-be queen. She is critical and self-focused, busy nursing her own traumas, but she is also a product of the same cultural expectations as her daughter and, in this way, she is a necessary double and worthy of empathy. “She taught me nourishment. / But in secret, between her and the soup, she shared a glass // and a glass and a glass,” the speaker tells us, attuned to the mother’s personal woes but also aware of their shared lineage: “…[W]e were from different planets, the same planet—,” and how to reconcile this strain? The answer arrives in “Bubbly + Cake,” a poem in which the speaker celebrates a birthday and the hard-earned ability to make space for competing truths, wrestling with feeling “hurt/happy/hurt” by her mother while also aligning with her: “…you are your mother’s daughter,” she asserts, a crucial moment in her development, as she learns to mine the big picture without dismissing her own feelings.
In “On Becoming Bertha,” the most emblematic poem of the spindle realm, Tombasco presents a speaker who evolves from a dreamy, docile girl to a triumphant, self-possessed woman. “I’ve slept too long in the moonlight, in velvet / undergrowth, bridled by alien trees, by menacing / green,” she begins, indicating a feeling of dormancy and isolation, continually threatened by external constraints. But she also knows this is a “honeymoon phase,” a period to polish her bones and ready them for gilded architecture. As she constructs her female stronghold, she offers “burnt sage, // honeyed decanters & a Stevie Nicks hex” in a collaborative effort that is torrential, and unrelenting: “I come from a long line of women sacrificing, gone batshit, // dark-forest-swallowing women, strong-smelling women / like cinnamon & rain & dust, tarantella-exorcising, / volcanic women who aren’t forgetting…” she boasts, “…no longer the girl you first met.”
While the concrete and spindle realms provide unique ground for the speaker to transform, they are characterized by the same conditions, images, and allusions, suggesting that although the world may never evolve, certainly a girl can and certainly she must. Food imagery is especially prevalent. Navel oranges, dirty martinis, sugar cane, Cheerios, red solo cups, English muffins, pistachios, donut shops, bar tabs, and Arizona iced tea anchor the poems in everyday experience, blending the themes of domesticity, nourishment, sensuality, and consumption into a sensory feast the speaker can take control of. Throughout the poems, the speaker is, in a sense, learning to pull up a chair at her own table, to discover within herself a deep well of skill and sustenance she can draw from. An early reference to When Harry Met Sally…’s “I’ll have what she’s having” scene also serves as one of the familiar cultural touchstones that pepper the collection, providing the speaker with an immersive and instructive experience. A girl’s world is replete with endless stimuli meant to stifle and distract, but here she learns to distinguish the noise from what is truly valuable. We see her in the world and of the world without being swallowed whole.
What I admire most about Milk for Gall is its commitment to “study,” the speaker often turning to the work of Emily Dickinson, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Edward Hopper, and Hieronymus Bosch, among others, to find evidence of her individual and collective making. She is curious, intentional, ravenous for knowledge, and in this way, a steady and active participant in her experience. The final poem of the spindle realm, “Take My Milk” references Lady Macbeth’s command, “Come to my woman’s breast / and take my milk for gall,” and gives the collection its title. A character considered overly ambitious when perhaps she is merely self-willed, Lady Macbeth highlights how difficult it is to reconcile one’s self-perception with the perceptions of others, mirroring the dilemma of Tombasco’s speaker, who, in growing more comfortable in her skin, wishes to be seen by others in the way she sees herself. But this is impossible, and the poem instead unfolds with a litany of assumptions the speaker vows to permit, creating a more viable route to power than her earlier quest to “devastate thine enemies”:
Take my continuous O’s
for gold rings and garter-beltedteeth and other minor exchanges
here and there. Barter my va-va-voomof biological destiny, the soft and fleshy
Renaissance sprawl.
The speaker is fearless enough to invite criticism because she knows she will no longer internalize it, her wisdom and self-possession emboldened by her dramatic use of the imperative. Now she is her own mirror; now she is her only audience.
Once inside the bulb realm, language becomes the primary mechanism for the speaker’s self-making. “There won’t be a cage…” she declares. Instead, there will be a wild adventure in self-narration. In “On Being Turquoise” (note the shift from becoming Bertha to being turquoise), she offers this poignant insight on the relationship between language, aspiration, and authenticity:
& that’s the time
to reflect, to think about what we desire most:
is it a cool linen vernacular or to be this
old bitter girl who lives in the blueish
grasp between winter & more winter?
The answer is vernacular, which should come as no surprise since the most consistent aspect of the speaker’s personality is her remarkable linguistic stamina. Throughout the collection, she serves up dazzlingly strange metaphors, unexpected syntactical arrangements, and sonic-rich turns of phrase that enrich and reacclimate us line after line. The speaker’s willingness to experiment so daringly with her speech also guarantees the creation of a verbal signature that is, in fact, a voice of many. In “Lolita Licking Wounds,” she explains: “No longer jilted creatures consoling ourselves, separated / from our hooves: the language lent here will outlast you / as the wayward we lean toward the chainlink & mist.” In a world where women’s identities continue to be regulated, certainly what outlasts in the minds of readers is Tombasco’s speaker, who navigates this terrain with courage and creativity, reminding us of the undeniable resilience—that one true utterance—of the female spirit.
Natalie Louise Tombasco was selected by Kaveh Akbar for the Best New Poets anthology 2021, Copper Nickel's Editor's Prize, and as a published finalist for the Cutbank Books chapbook contest with her manuscript titled "Collective Inventions" (2021). She is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and serves as the Interviews Editor of the Southeast Review. Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Plume, Hobart Pulp, Fairy Tale Review, Peach Mag, The Rupture, Puerto del Sol, among others. Find out more at www.natalielouisetombasco.com
Susan L. Leary is the author of five poetry collections, including More Flowers (Trio House Press, forthcoming 2026); Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the 2023 Louise Bogan Award; and the chapbook, A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Smartish Pace, Harpur Palate, and Verse Daily, and her reviews have appeared in New Orleans Review, EcoTheo Review, and Psaltery & Lyre. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and lives in Indianapolis, IN.