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What does it mean to live in a woman’s body?

Adele Evershed’s poetry collection, “Red Threads and Silver Linings: A Woman’s Life in Haiku, One Bloody Drop at a Time”, answers this question through a series of sharp, intimate, witty, and sometimes painfully honest haiku. The collection follows a woman’s journey from her first period through adolescence, love, pregnancy, motherhood, aging, menopause, and finally a renewed sense of self.

What I particularly enjoyed about this collection is Evershed’s refusal to exhibit womanhood as a source of sentimental melody.  Menstruation is messy. Pregnancy can bring both joy and grief. Childbirth can be frightening. Motherhood can be beautiful and exhausting. Menopause can be confusing, uncomfortable, and even funny. So, there is nothing to romanticize or traumatize.

The opening poems capture the secrecy and bewilderment of a girl experiencing her first period. In “budding moon,” the first blood becomes a “first secret,” while “cherry blossom” compares the pale blush of a first period to nature’s blossoming. These poems are remarkable because they transform embarrassment into imagery. The sanitary belt in “loop hole” becomes a humorous reminder of how confusing the technology and rituals of menstruation can be for a young girl.

The collection becomes particularly poignant when it explores pregnancy and loss. Poems such as “suncups” and “ghost apple” deal with the absence of an unborn child and the grief that follows.  One of the most moving moments comes when the speaker scatters her mother’s ashes and simultaneously feels the kick of her unborn baby, a beautiful image of death and new life existing together.

Evershed is equally fearless about childbirth. “Childbirth and Other Horrors” does exactly what its title promises, bringing pain, medical intervention, bodily trauma, and postpartum emotions into the poems. Yet tenderness follows the horror, particularly in “dandelion clock,” where a newborn’s soft breath becomes an image of wonder.

The later poems about aging and menopause are perhaps the collection’s most refreshing part. Evershed does not treat menopause as the end of a woman’s story. Instead, she finds humor in the changing body and continues to explore identity, desire, memory, and renewal. “freak storm / a flood in my pants/perimenopause…” perfectly captures her ability to turn an uncomfortable experience into something humorous and memorable.

“Encore” is a fitting final section, suggesting life doesn’t end with menopause. In the image of azaleas “reblooming in my bush”, post-menopause becomes a wonderful metaphor for discovering new possibilities.  The final poem, “she left her story / rewilding her life / in ink…,” feels like a declaration of creative and personal freedom.

The haiku form works beautifully in Evershed’s expert hand.  She compresses enormous experiences into just a few lines. A missed period can hold fear; an ultrasound photograph can hold grief; a newborn’s breath can hold wonder; and a changing body can become an entire season. Evershed has shown how haiku can move beyond conventional expectations of quiet landscapes and seasonal observation. Here, the landscape is the female body itself. The moon, flowers, tides, seasons, fruit, birds, and weather mirror menstruation, pregnancy, aging, sexuality, and menopause.

Evershed refuses to divide the female body into “beautiful” and “unbeautiful” experiences. In her experience, blood and blossom, pain and humor, birth and death, youth and aging coexist. The grotesque can be tender, and the ordinary can become profound.

“Red Threads and Silver Linings” ultimately celebrates the female body in all its complexity. It is bloody, funny, uncomfortable, tender, occasionally heartbreaking, and wonderfully honest. More importantly, it reminds us that a woman’s story does not end with youth, motherhood, or menopause. There is always another season, another story, another chance to rebloom.

Buy the book “Red Threads and Silver Linings”