In Muzzle, Rivka Clifton cracks open the quiet violences that so often go unnamed—what we inherit, what we internalize, and what we risk passing on. Set against a backdrop of the rural Midwest, this debut collection brims with restrained intensity, where even stillness can feel like a threat. Clifton’s poems are not declarations; they’re inquiries—fragmented, recursive, and deeply embodied. The speaker often seems caught mid-thought, mid-sentence, mid-unraveling, which is precisely the point: Muzzle is less interested in resolution than in tracing the contours of harm, grief, and the desperate desire to transform them.

Recurring images—mouths, tongues, sinew, empty beds—evoke the tension between speech and silence, between touch and avoidance. “Yes, I believe I believed. / What else was there to do // when my mouth’s use mystified my mouth?” the speaker asks, encapsulating the book’s central question: how do we live inside a body, inside language, when both have been used as sites of violence? Even when the poems allude to hunting or parenthood, the real target often feels more intimate: the self, the memory, the unprocessed anger coiled beneath the surface.

Clifton’s language is sparse but searing, balancing poetic minimalism with emotional weight. These poems are curious about what it means to cause harm without meaning to, to parent with the memory of being parented poorly, to speak when silence feels safer. There are no tidy answers here, only careful examinations of what it costs to be tender in a world that teaches you to muzzle yourself—or to bite.

Recommended for readers drawn to lyric fragmentation, emotional ambiguity, and the complex ethics of care. Muzzle will resonate with those who’ve sat with the uncomfortable truth that survival sometimes comes at the cost of softness—and still crave a poetry that reaches toward softness anyway.

📖 Read this if you love: fragmented lyricism, rural hauntings, and poetry that interrogates the ethics of speech and silence.

🔑 Key Themes: Language as Violence, Inherited Harm and Familial Memory, Embodiment and Grief, Survival and Restraint, The Fragility of Tenderness.