Reviewed by Ona Gritz
Content Warning: Graphic language
Once, nearly ten years ago, I had the great luck to stumble upon an online recording of a young, unknown-to-me poet reading a poem about heading under the surgeon’s knife. The imagery—“the urine yellow soap that will soften/ your skin to ripening pear,” “…the bed…a paper boat/ on a hazy Hudson”—was vivid and fresh. Every line astounded me, and the discovery felt personal. The writer, like me, was a woman with cerebral palsy. I committed her name to memory, friended her on Facebook, waited with excitement for a debut collection.
That collection, Liv Mammone’s Fire in the Waiting Room, is here and has proved well worth the wait. Mammone’s voice is fierce and original. Her poems, biting, wise, and incandescent. Brave is a word we have good reason to eschew when praising the work of our disabled kin, but Mammone the poet is fearless. No subject is too thorny to touch, no emotion too unpretty or raw to explore.
Take, for example, her poem “The Ease of Strawberries.” Running through it are lines about climate change, human degradation, and suicidal ideation.
The Coca Cola Company is creating water scarcity in Kerala, India and
Driscoll Berries employs undocumented children to pick the fruit in this
bowl.I’ve been awake two days telling myself my suicide won’t change any of
that.
And yet the poem is deeply uplifting, not only because the language is gorgeous, but because Mammone has the wisdom and skill to hold opposing truths to the light. To name our accountability for the damage we’ve done to our planet and to each other and then wrap that naming in a praise song for human ingenuity, compassion, and growth.
I am a person who only exists because of science; because humans ask and
discover and want to cure death. That impulse got us to this brink…I tell myself I am meant to be here—meant to be now. …Maybe the
planet is a narrative. Maybe I’m a step that can’t be skipped…
Alongside Mammone’s signature grit and imagination is her tremendous wit. When, for example, she encounters a person on Tumblr who, referring to the ADA requirement for accessibility renovations, claims, “Destroying historic buildings to make a few people happy is stupid” she has none other than Venus de Milo respond.
Little heart,
your respect for what has passed is commendable,
but stone feels no pain.What is built is meant to change;
to crack and hollow out.
A room’s only wish is to hold
the echo of voices—would you rob it of more?
Would you rob me of more gazes to meet;
of the chance to stare back at
bodies that mirror mine?
When she finds herself, in the throes of self-pity, disparaging her crutches, she has them speak up for themselves.
We’re not a broken promise.
We’re possibility.
We’re keys or battering ram.
We’re not a failing.
Neither will we fail.
And in confronting society’s asexualizing of the disabled, she tells us,
My vagina thinks I’m sexy.
She says it’s not her fault
if my legs can’t support that.
In this same poem, “Vagina Resigning” a faint echo of Allen Ginsberg’s influence can be found.
My vagina bitch slapped him. She demands to be
objectified like any able pussy in America!
Another, “To my Breasts” appears to be in direct conversation with Sharon Olds’s poems “Known to be Left” and “Poem for the Breasts.”
sweet rose fruit
plums of february sunrise
dumb flesh…
you don’t know why no one
comes to touch
But like the work of those very bards she conjures, what makes Mammone’s poetry so essential is the new ground it breaks. To borrow again from her own beautiful lines, Mammone’s poetry is “cultivating self like some rare bloom.” It is “filled with power and with love.” This book, the first of what I hope will be many, is a manifesto on being and staying vibrantly alive.
Title: Fire in the Waiting Room
Author: Liv Mammone
Publisher: Game Over Books
Date: 2025
Read Liv Mammon’s review of How I Bend Into More: A Long Poem in this issue of Wordgathering.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Book Reviews | Back to Volume 19, Issue 2 – Winter 2025-2026
About the Reviewer
Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, the Independent Author Award in New Nonfiction, the Independent Author Award in True Crime, and is an Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read. Her nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, Brevity, Parents, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays and a Best Life Story in Salon. The Space You Left Behind, Ona’s first young adult novel, written in verse, has just been released from West 44 Books and is featured in The Children’s Book Council’s Hot Off the Press roundup of anticipated best sellers.