An Invitation to Softness
A Review of
Make Believe: Poems for Hoping Again
Victoria Hutchins
Paperback: Convergent, 2025
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Reviewed by Rachel Lonas
Recently, my family and I went to a social gathering for our church at a local beer garden. We have only been attending around 9 months and it’s a larger church with 3 services, so we took this chance to meet some new people. After chatting with some friends we knew, they introduced us to a friend of theirs who majored in Latin and had a deep love of poetry though, in her words, none of that was her day job “for now”. We told her about our local writer’s group and our love of Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, and anything Clint Smith writes, poetry or otherwise. By the end of the night, she said she felt like a new spark had been lit in her for seeking out more contemporary poetry and she would definitely be at our writer’s group next month. An hour of conversation reverberated beyond the mirthful din that surrounded us that night. In a similar way, I see Victoria Hutchins reaching out to readers with poetry-as-invitation-to-life in her debut Make Believe: Poems for Hoping Again.
I was initially intrigued about what kind of words, form, and vulnerability would come from a high powered lawyer turned soft, poetic writer. I figured there must be worlds upon worlds waiting to escape. The name of her poetry collection encapsulates all the little thoughts and treasures of someone who gives her readers permission to feel, perhaps in a new way that her earlier high performance life did not allow her to feel. With some of the titles being rather on the nose and some inviting you into mystery, Hutchins deftly mixes heavier themes and lightness as she weaves in analogies from childhood — swings on the playground, shopping at the mall, imaginary friends, birthday cakes. Naturally, there is a feeling of comfort that washes over you as an adult reading poetry like this; you acknowledge the harshness of broken relationships around you (with people, the land, God, and others) and also a time when the world kept those things hidden from you with all the delight and wonder it had to offer. Hutchins wants you to lean back into that time of infinite possibility with the wisdom life has had to guide you. She says in “When You’re Lonely, Ask a Stranger for the Time”
“…Crack a little joke to the person next to you in the elevator. Bring the park
security guard a fun fact every morning.
These are small things. They will not fix you. But once, at the grocery store, I
accidentally patted an old woman’s hand as we reached for the same head of
romaine.
I said: I’m sorry about that! Great minds think alike!
She replied, Don’t be. That’s the only touch I’ll get today.
And I laughed. Me, too” (51).
Hutchins structured her book in 5 sections revolving around wonder, the body, hope, love and heaven with a generous amount of poems and questioning in each. If you’re paying attention, she nods to several famous poets while playing with many different styles of modern poetry — some with interesting spacing, some being more prose and others being short and playful.
Though Hutchins doesn’t outright share her faith background, I spotted a few allusions to those of an evangelical upbringing (heaven, purity rings, true love waits, VBS, Garden of Eden, etc.). For those of us who lived through that culture and have still maintained faith, her reexamining is a welcome place of wrestling, naming and freeing religious shame, and above all providing softness. I am not in the same place as her on some of the hot button issues she tackles, but by simply asking “what if..” she gives her readers a chance to think for themselves, regardless of whether they agree with her musings. My favorite poem around new hope is one that revisits the old. In “Church Hath No Wisdom Like a Child Wondering” she writes about a very young girl being upset that the church had to exterminate the cockroaches because they may have wanted to come to vacation bible school like the rest of them. Hutchins says:
“God, grant me the sageness of a child.
Help me to remember how to look at what
I’m told is a disposable life
and see my own face.
God, restore the boundlessness of the cup
of that which I deem like me,
like you” (15).
I actually read this poem to my middle schoolers because they enjoy poems about bugs and they all go to church; it stuck with them. Earlier in the year, I read “Allowables” by Nikki Giovanni and told them it was about a spider, but also not. I watched the wheels turn in their head as they exclaimed, “Ohhh!” To my delight, they have referenced that poem as a connection point several times the rest of the school year as we have read other snippets of life in poetry that point to a larger theme. Hutchins, at times, has a similar effect.
Many poems in this collection touch on the universal idea that as children we must use whatever is at our disposal to get our needs met, but as adults we can gently lay down those relationships, harmful thoughts, and triggered reactions that we are learning to outgrow. She does not trumpet that she or the reader has now arrived, but that we can look forward with hope in our everyday observations. Her poem “Shapeshifter” speaks to a reality that we’re all hiding in our own skin comparing us to other creatures in the natural world who use color and camouflage as a survival technique.
“Maybe when my life flashes before my eyes at the end of all this, I’ll see every shade of woman I ever was. Maybe on the other side waits my nature before nurture. Some iridescent, steady thing” (31).
Hutchins, like any good poet, often lets the last line linger in the heart.
Rachel Lonas
Rachel Lonasis a writer and educator specializing in literature and composition. Several of her pieces can be found at Fathom Magazine. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her husband,
Justin, and their four daughters. She enjoys all things creative—watercoloring, nature journaling, landscaping, and being inspired by botanical gardens.
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