“Heavenly joy means growing back- wards,” Szporluk tells readers early on in Startle Pattern, foreshadowing the tilting path of her collection. Haunted by visions of loss and the ongoing violence of the body, these poems unfold like memories through time as personal tragedies become dark fairy tales. Startle Pattern illustrates that a passing of years does not create healing: that pain, after fulling seizing the physical, bleeds into the psyche.
