Ellen Stone reviews
The Worry Dolls
by Shannon K. Winston

In times of discord or conflict, is it human nature to look backwards or is that just the direction our times point us in? As if, in gazing toward our origins, maybe we could pinpoint the beginnings of tumult, chaos, displacement.  Follow trouble back to the source, sleuth it out. Shannon K. Winston’s recent poetry collection, The Worry Dolls, strikes a familiar chord in me. There is a kind of constant chiming in these poems, almost a chant, a patterned return from where we started. The poems ask us where worry comes from. Are we born into it or are we led there through the path of our lives?

Winston’s poems interrogate worry from the beginning of life, poems initially almost encased in amniotic fluid: a child born too soon, mother octopus—so many arms, hearts, suction cups holding on. In the book’s title poem, “The Worry Dolls,” the child just “…wanted to be a jellyfish—to move gelatinously and softly, only a fine membrane for skin…To float and glow electric against the blue.” Meanwhile there is mother as rescuer, but also instructor on worry, on solutions, or prevention. Worry dolls slipped under a child’s pillow, hidden hex-signs?  While an early life is filled with appointments, experts, equipment— the everyday work of worry.

Children have a way of seeking patterns, the world organized numerically to understand it. Two remarkable poems in the collection enlighten the reader. “Lights” begins the book with sisters charting their nighttime communication energy through colors. “What light are you? my sister whispers from across the room.” Later, in “Numbers,” “I’m done with sadness/Sister One says to Sister Two/as she flicks her hair back/ as if pushing away helplessness…The sisters have their own/system. Numbers are easier than loss.”  The girls wander a carnival assigning numbers like names to people’s assumed grief. Children, the grief calculators, the ones who know and keep track.

Winston does not shy away from grief in The Worry Dolls.  Instead, the poems meet worry turned anxiety moving into panic attacks. Worry as an actor in a play forgetting lines. Anxiety as a hagfish, no bones, just slime. Panic attack as mother showering an adult daughter or a self-portrait as a stranger drowning in a river—both fugues, but complex musical composition or disassociations of the mind, it is not entirely clear. What is obvious is the way these poems define how worry grows and lives in us, clamping us down, capturing us as prisoners in our own bodies.

But there is also so much fluid movement and music in The Worry Dolls starting with that child’s song from the title poem: “My body, a buoyant transparent bell, perpetually ringing. Can’t you hear I’m singing?”  Yes, we can hear you! I want to yell. That cello constantly playing throughout the book, its backdrop melody a kind of unresolved grief that does not completely give in to sorrow. The poems instruct us, too. “Pitch,” “…meaning blooms/between quietness and cadence.” “Vibrato,” “…the interplay of two pitches…two lives.” “Lilt,” “a sound that brushes your wrist like a whisper…the name of the woman you want to be.” It is as if the movement of music always remains, no matter the worry we live through. That constant beauty, that chiming keeps us sane.

Somewhere between timidity and fury, between shrinking and swelling, fear and elation lie the poems in The Worry Dolls. What I find so reassuring is both the clarity and the solidity of the work.  The everydayness of the poems grounds me—a poem to a grocery store cashier, a terrarium at Home Depot, a yard sale of family items. Climate change as seen through the eyes of small boy at night in bed, a woman buying perfume. The critical life issue of a cancer scare as hourglass, or x marks the spot. The decision to adopt a child addressed while doing laundry during the pandemic.  Although the book is born of questioning, of wondering, and even terror, that is not the overriding sensation of reading the collection. Instead, it is as if the poet sits the reader down and says: Let me tell you what I have discovered in my wondering, let me invite you into some wandering and maybe we can figure out where we’ve ended up.

I almost hate to end a review of The Worry Dolls with notes of hope because the book makes such an excellent case for understanding worry in order to live with it, but I cannot help myself. I find myself cheering for the partner as companion at a beautiful dinner despite a nasty fellow patron “At A Restaurant in Portland, Maine.”  That partner who floats in Epsom salts and believes she was a warrior in a different life in “Floating.” Who calls their lover a flamingo like the burlesque dancer/grandmother in “The Future.”  Just like the little bird in “Outside My Window,” we all need someone when we are most lonely. “It’s true: you can make a home/out of just about anything,” that last poem tells us, but this book sure does make a case for love being a primal focus. Regardless of where worry comes from, how to give it soft landing, a home. I am all for that solution these days, and I think it is where The Worry Dolls ends up.  How lucky for all of us.

Ellen Stone is the author of Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them (Mayapple Press, 2025), and What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared recently in Third Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review Mixtape, Midwest Review, About Place, and Feral. Reach Ellen at https://www.ellenstone.org/.

Shannon K. Winston is the author of The Worry Dolls (Glass Lyre Press, 2025) and The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, the Los Angeles Review, RHINO Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com/.