Book Review: In glimpses and reminisces
In glimpses & reminisces. Candace D. Marquez Green, Lulu.com, September 2025, paperback, 75 pages.
Reviewed by Amy Purcell.
Some poems demand to be read aloud to best hear their musicality and feel their emotionality. Candace D. Marquez Green’s compelling and heart-full collection, In glimpses & reminisces, is that kind of poetry. Even the title, spoken aloud, offers the punchy, spirited cadence that resonates throughout the 34 poems.
Green’s note to the reader positions this chapbook as “a glimpse into my lyrical history. Every page is a moment I lived, reminisced, loved and lost.” Green does not shy away from raw emotions, and the collection is all the better for her willingness to confront moments in her relationships and life’s journey that were either fraught with conflict or filled with tenderness.
She captures the universality of what it means to have loved and lost and to also come out on the other side of a relationship still filled with hope and faith and the desire to dare to love again. As Green looks back and considers what she’s learned from these moments, the reader is treated to stanzas and lines that stick in your mind like a strong melody.
“A Soul’s Storm” has a punctuated rhythm that evokes the frustrated longing that comes with the desire to feel and experience everlasting love.
So far from calm,
My needs going off like an alarm
Tired of acting like I’m daydreaming
When I’m really sedating
The love in my heart that I feel fading
One particular standout is “A Queen’s Dream” for both its clever phrase-turning and its emotional bite.
I wonder what it’s like for her
to have never been a “has been”
The poem evokes a privileged life, one that is neither accessible or attainable, and could lead to feelings of envy. Yet, by the end of the poem, Green finds space for empathy instead of ire.
The emotional arc in “My Dear” rides high on idealized love and the optimism that comes with it.
Everything before you
seems tasteless, time wasted. …
And what I love most
is you never try to tame me
or blame me for what happened in the past.
When the poem turns at the end, the final line delivers a surprisingly devastating blow, which I won’t reveal since it’s well worth the read.
Green’s strength is in the realness of her tone and the resilience that resonates throughout the collection. Although she wrote most of the collection during a “profoundly gray season of life”, there’s never a sense of resignation; instead, one can feel Green’s inner engine revving up to carry on, to witness, to see and be seen. As stated in her bio, the collection offers readers the “reminder that vulnerability is a form of strength.”
The poem I came back to again and again was “Yours Only.”
When you read this page,
Know that this one page was written
for you.
This is all about you…
While the poem’s opening lines feel as if they’re speaking directly to the reader, they could also be a love letter to a former lover, a deceased loved one or even oneself. It contains the kind of inspiration you’d frame for your office or bedroom wall as a reminder that someone cares deeply for you; that someone will always see you, as the poem goes on to state as “flawless.”
In many ways, In glimpses & reminisces is an assemblage of love letters. There is self-love in the recognition and lessons that come from looking back on life. There’s unrequited love, motherly love and troubled love here, too. And there is, of course, grief, which is often considered the B-side of love—for we can only grieve when we have loved deeply. Within these poems, Green shows that she has experienced profound connections and profound sorrows, all as a testament to the pain and beauty of being human.
