The Unreliable Tree by Margot Kahn Reviewed by Margaret Anne Kean

The Unreliable Tree by Margot Kahn

Reviewer: Margaret Anne Kean

Publisher: Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press

Publication Date: September 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8101-4793-2

Pages: 67

In her debut poetry collection, The Unreliable Tree, nonfiction author, baker and poet Margot Kahn chose an epigraph from Li Young-Lee’s poem “Of Blossoms”:

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days . . .

These four lines convey not only a tenderness and longing but also set up the premise of Kahn’s book: an invitation to witness as she explores the unvarnished depths of her life. She writes in the poem, “The Armour Court”: “My whole life I’ve wanted//to be that girl – plated, chained, impenetrable./To take the field first, to reveal myself later.” But through four sections, she reveals her vulnerability as she probes multiple facets of her life over time. Weaving the specificity of the place where she lives, its meadows and hills, waterways and animals, into the marrow of the poems, she explores the complexity of marriage, friendship, aging, diaspora and death.

The book’s title, and the opening poem “Marrying,” allude to how some years a tree will produce an abundance of fruit and some years, nothing at all: a metaphor for all human experience. The poet speaks to our vulnerability and interdependence with others and the natural world. “I never imagined how inconsequential/ we would be, how at the mercy of the wind,/the rain, the bees.” 

Kahn weaves memory with knowledge acquired over time, asking the reader to journey with her into her childhood to think about what the young girl knew to be true, even as she lived within a rich imagination. She asks the reader to consider what is consequential about hayfields. “Feathery as a freyed hem,/in the wind” and relationships that die. “…the hayfield moves/like the tufted manes of a thousand/horses running,” she writes in “Field of Vision.” Recalling how she hid in the field after school with a girlfriend, waiting to be found, waiting for someone to call them back to their homes, she remembers how “They were tortures in equal/measure: the waiting and/the being found.” She has since come to understand that sometimes “a bond is only as strong/as a breath of air.” When relationships die, “The raptors will come circling,” and in response we will look for patterns to understand why our life has evolved as it has. 

To that end, her astute observations remind us that we make choices on a daily basis as we respond to whatever experiences come our way. In “Taking Advantage of a Summer Day”, she writes: “I stay in the kitchen, beat salt and butter/with a wooden spoon, go out only to see the beets//in flower before the root has fully grown,/….Why didn’t I sit/outside today?….”

Kahn interrogates how we understand and see our bodies in the context of relationships we cherish. What does it mean to love our bodies, to love bodies that change due to age and illness? “My Mother Could Always Wear Anything” contains stark images of her mother’s now  “muddled ankles…her legs peppered with divots/like my two-rut drive,” and in “Western Tanager”, she writes of her friend who has lost a breast to cancer: “And you, wearing your new breast, your legs/iridescent as a hummingbird, your head//as bare as our babies’ were.” Weaving her friend’s loss with the migration of the Western Tanager, she speaks to the movement of life, and how even in the midst of losses, we can stop and gaze with wonder. “By November//this joule of a bird will have flown. But today—/look at us! stopped on our path, breathless.”

Other poems in the collection address generational movement across lands, including allusions to the Holocaust, and the impact it had not just on those that had to leave their homes, but the subsequent generations that don’t share that same experience. This generational loss is referenced in multiple poems in the second section, such as “Plum Season.” She asks, “But then, who isn’t living/in diaspora? Who visits the graves/of their old people? Do your people have graves?” Recognizing that this also causes her to rethink her relationship to land, she continues: “To think these trees are mine – I have learned nothing.”

The poet requires us to hold space for what we don’t know or don’t understand. We read of the speaker’s inability to fully understand what her grandparents’ experiences meant to them and thus to her. In the poem, “Fermata,” she writes: “In my grandparents’ living room I tinkered, never taught,/while my grandmother lit candles for everyone she’d lost./There the old people kept the old country to themselves.”

Throughout the collection, the poet considers our need to find balance despite misfortune, loss and various upheavals in our life. In “A Quiet Day with the West on Fire,” she recalls: “In these days of smoke/and haze, I hold onto the smallest things –//watch the caterpillar sleep, listen/to the boy sing.” It is in the specificity of these images where she finds solace and balance and calls the reader to also pay attention. And in the poem “Walking to the End of the Road on the Last Day of July” she asks, “How have I never noticed/the plums in all the years I’ve walked to the sea?”

In Section 3, Kahn explores the various ways we are violent and harm others, especially the most vulnerable: young girls who are abused by men in power, children shot in schools, slugs run over on the roadway, Freddy Mercury beat up on the playground, a homeless man on a bus stop bench, and people who died young. Her focus in this section is not just our complicit silence but our need to notice and take action – whether moving a slug onto the side of the road as she does, or in the poem “In Which I Excuse Freddy Mercury From PE”: “The permission//I gave might have been a lie. But look,/I gave it anyway.”

She asks the reader to not look away, to engage in empathy, even for the lowly slug (although the title of that poem is “Mixed Feelings About My Contribution to Humanity”). Her poems cause us to think about what we value, what we choose to see and how we will move through the world weighted by that knowledge.

In the final section of the book, she examines life choices she has made. She appears to be asking these questions: Can we reconcile with decisions that have been made in the past? How do you navigate change when things fall apart? The penultimate poem, “Winter,” begins: “My husband and I get divorced/every winter, driving over the mountains.”  (This poem bookends the first poem “Marrying” which starts with the phrase: “My husband and I marry every year/eating apricots from the unreliable tree.”) Nothing is static in the speaker’s world or taken for granted. “This, we agree,/is the solution to dissolution:/alight in the places that will hold you./Pass through darkness with the swiftest grace.”

The last image in the final poem, “Skiing” is the speaker moving “deeper/and deeper into the trees.” This image connects us back to the book title and to both a future of uncertainty and possibilities. Earlier in the book, Kahn wrote in “Free Boat at the Corner of Kjargaard and Fisherman Bay”: “I like that I’m a woman who can still/be curious when she turns a corner.” The ending of the last poem illustrates the speaker’s desire to continue exploring life fully, to be curious about what lies within the trees and invites the reader to do the same.

Margot Kahn is the author of a collection of poems, The Unreliable Tree, and the biography of champion bronc rider “Cody” Bill Smith, Horses That Buck. Together with Kelly McMasters, she is also co-editor of two anthologies–the New York Times Editors’ Choice collection This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home and Wanting: Women Writing About Desire, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year and ABA indie national bestseller. Her essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, New England Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Society of America, The Slowdown, The Rumpus, and BUST.

Margaret Anne Kean (she/her) is a poetry reader of Inch micro-chapbooks with Bull City Press and author of the chapbook, Cleaving the Clouds (Kelsay Books, 2023). She is collaborating with a Portland, Oregon composer on “Grief Work,” a tanka series. The first of five was debuted in October 2024. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in a variety of journals including Whale Road Review, The Compulsive Reader, EcoTheo Review, Tupelo Quarterly, About Place Journal and Rogue Agent Journal. Kean received her BA from Scripps College and MFA from Antioch University/LA. She lives and writes in Pasadena, California and Chicago, Illinois.

15 July 2026