Boneyard Heresies by Tina Schumann Reviewed by Sarah Carey

Boneyard Heresies by Tina Schumann
Reviewed by Sarah Carey

Publisher: Moon City Press

Publication Date: February 3, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-913785-75-1
Page Count: 98 pages

To borrow a ubiquitous phrase, poet Tina Schumann’s latest book, Boneyard Heresies, had me at hello. The book’s epigraph — “Know your own bone, gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still,” from Henry David Thoreau — immediately resonated with me. All of us have such bones; the central concerns and preoccupations we return to throughout our lifetimes. By caching, excavating, and rearticulating those touchstones in poetic language, Schumann shows us how we can better understand our own being. So greeted, I was intrigued by what might lay ahead in the poems that would follow.

Coincidentally, I was reading Thoreau’s Walden at the time, and the concept of building a satisfying life based on stripped-down essentials and examining what it is we really need was dancing in my head. This might be why Boneyard Heresies got my attention and held it: every poem in this collection feels essential. Every poem moves from the personal to speak to a universal aspect of the human condition, whether it be the perpetual search for meaning in the midst of long-held grief, the quest for self-acceptance, or the reassurance that one’s life, or life in general, matters.

 In “Dear Morning Commuters,” Schumann alludes to the interconnectedness of humankind as a foundational force, a kind of physics that governs our lives independent of personal agency:   

	The clean white shirt of it; our daily habits
	that make a life, a confluence
	of routine and resolution.

        Thank you for your dedication, your steadfast
	reliability; guy with gray cap and earbuds,
	woman with brown-eyed child
	and battered briefcase.

        Your bravery
	proceeds you.
	I could not do it without you.

Throughout the collection, winner of the 2024 Moon City Press Poetry Award, Schumann’s versatile poetic voice toggles between confident and wistful, clinical and confessional, biting and vulnerable. Stylistic craft techniques and smart, contemporary dialogue between self-and-self and poet-and-reader render the poems in Boneyard Heresies fresh and eminently readable. At its core, Schumann’s book addresses serious philosophical concerns, such as: Who are we, really? How are we alive in the world together? Who will remain to remember us when we die? What part of us dies when our parents, along with anyone who knew us as notions, newborns or children, pass away, absconding with any memories or stories that testify to our being?

The narrative arc that unfolds through the book’s three sections highlights the poet’s own bones, her key obsessions: family and familial loss, identity, immigration and the quest for belonging, community, and human flaws, including her own and those of her lost beloveds. She also consistently interrogates the role of the self as a refractory mirror to the imperfect, elusive (but never entirely unredeemable or joyless) world we live in. The poems in this collection, many of which are written in the form of letters and self-portraits, examine that self continually, allowing the reader access to the speaker’s most intimate experiential moments, from deep grief to self-loathing. 

Past, present, and future blend together in Schumann’s world view. Her poem, “Self Portrait as Unreliable Narrator,” conveys through its title and strategic placement as the book’s opening poem, the caveat that the speaker’s truth is as elusive as anyone else’s:

         Covert operator.
         Identity agent. As in
         as an inside job can be.

         Habitual vertical
         pronoun whistling
         in the dark.

In another self-portrait poem, “Self-Portrait as Marginalia,” she writes:
        
         It begins with sideline inquisitions, internal
               directives—
         notes to self about self.
               A kind of homemade pedagogy.
                        Very meta, as they say.

And in the concluding lines:
        
           One feels inclined to state
                              The primary character has not suffered.
               	    (not sufficiently) and
           What’s with the constant ruminations?
               The interjections from her dead mother?
		   Seems a bit distracting.
           Also, If you’re going to mock, mock hard.

Schumann’s poems often remind us that we are all in this together: this experiment (not to get too carried away with Thoreau’s Walden concept) and wild experience called life. Her epistolary technique works well toward that end. From “Letter of Introduction”:

          Dear reader, this will come as no surprise
          since we are all meteors speeding toward one good burnout
          but I’d like to reiterate that we are also a murder of crows
          nodding our compliance in a downtown alley, 
          the a cappella group in the background tellin’ it like it is.

In “Dear Bitter Old Woman of My Future Self,” Schumann’s speaker takes on ego, ambition, and the acrid taste of envy. Who among us hasn’t compared ourselves to others at some point in our lives when it comes to beauty or talent? Schumann nails that urge in this poem:
          
           There will always be someone more beautiful
                     than you. Know this. Know it like you know your own name,
           your mother’s voice, and your high school locker combo. Sing it with me now—
                                       She’s so beautiful, but-she’s-gonna-die-someday.
	           (She, so full of hip and sway
                                      and a Columbia-issued MFA.)

Serving as both documentarian and witness in this collection, Schumann uses images and phrases both modern and timeless, in poems that offer a world we can all recognize and readily claim a piece of. That universality of experience is present throughout all three sections, but in the first, The Clean White Shirt of It, several poems speak to the nature of everyday life, and how we’re all stuck on that proverbial train of routine — both literally as commuters and metaphorically as living humans in today’s world.

I loved “Why I Read the Obits” from this section, in which Schumann answers her own question by saying the dead deserve at least some formal acknowledgement, even if it falls short. Here, she tells the reader that no attempt at “elegiac magic” will ever come:  

         close to the slog of every lived day
         the sales job that paid the rent, 

         that thing their mother said, 
         the 3:00 am. taxi that ended 
         their great love.

Schumann finds her own story in others’ stories, reading between the lines of what’s said and what’s left unsaid about a life, and telling us why:

	Because I crave the angst
	and pride of an immigrant

	starting over in a new country, 
	disembodied in a foreign landscape—

	free of gravity, earthly habits, 
	and the torment of time.



Being born to a Salvadoran immigrant mother and raised in the United States is key to Schumann’s perspective, and the question of belonging consistently haunts her. In “Things My Mother Told Me,” Schumann breaks the poem into three sections, each of which positions her mother in a specific place while her mother relays stories from her experience in El Salvador and in the United States when the speaker was a child. The mother’s revelations are amplified by the vivid settings from which they are delivered: “standing at the bathroom sink, wiping steam from the mirror, putting on lipstick…while driving me to school, rolling down the window to expel smoke from a Salem…while sitting on the edge of the tub teaching me to shave my legs.” The memories and stories, powerful to begin with, emerge as more so on the page due to the way Schumann presents them.

The poems in Boneyard Heresies kept me reading to the end, stopping sometimes to flip back to previous pages with parallel passages or echoing phrases. Certain poems, particularly those in the middle section that focus on her parents, their lives and deaths and her childhood, struck especially close to home for me, having grieved the loss of both of my parents in the last eight years. My own life touchstones felt both validated and recast in the elemental truths Schumann lays bare, and how close they cut, well, to the bone.

Tina Schumann is the award-winning author of four poetry collections, most recently Boneyard Heresies, winner of the Moon City Press Poetry Award (Missouri State University); Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019) a finalist in the National Poetry Series, and the Julie Suk Award among others; Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition and As If (Parlor City Press, 2010) winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is editor of the IPPY-award winning anthology Two Countries. U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen, 2017.) Schumann’s work received the American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, runner-up status in the 2023 annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from The Missouri Review and finalist status in the 2013 Terrain.org annual poetry contest. Her work has received honorable mentions in The Atlantic, Crab Creek Review and The Allen Ginsberg Editors’ Choice Award. She serves as the poetry editor with Wandering Aengus Press, and her poems have appeared in publications since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Bear Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Cimarron Review, Diode, Hunger Mountain Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. She recently retired as director of communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, where she worked for 35 years. Her poetry often explores place, familial and environmental loss, human and animal relationships, and ancestral inheritance through the lens of Southern landscapes and scientific observation. Her poems have appeared recently in Gulf Coast, Five Points, Sugar House Review, Florida Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared in Salamander, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the Los Angeles Review. Sarah’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Orison Anthology and Best of the Net. Her debut full-length collection, The Grief Committee Minutes, (Saint Julian Press, September 2024) was an Eric Hoffer Award finalist. Her next book, Bloodstream, was released from Mercer University Press in February 2026.  Sarah also is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com, on Instagram @skcarey1, Bluesky @saycarey1.bsky.social or Twitter/X @SayCarey1.

25 March 2026