In deciding to explore the complex and agonizing story of her brother’s life, Cuban author Cristina Garcia abandons her usual prose and writes in poetry, a form more appropriate for the intense feelings she bears toward her brother, a sick and broken man who was routinely victimized by his family as a child. Tracing her brother’s life from his birth in 1960, when the family became one of the first families to escape to New York from Castro’s Cuba, she recreates his life through poetry, up to 2007, when the book was first published. These short poems in free verse engage the reader in filling in some blanks, and as one does, the growing horrors of this child’s life; the author’s own feelings of guilt for being unable (for whatever reason) to stop the torments her brother endured; her intense resentments against her parents, especially her mother; and her abiding sadness for the shell of a man her brother has become threaten to overwhelm the reader in the same degree that they must have overwhelmed the author.
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This collection of poems by Andrea Cohen is different—special—so fresh, so accessible, and so exciting in its imagery, irony, humor, and honest sentiment, that time became irrelevant for me when I was reading. In the course of three hours, I was laughing, smiling in knowing agreement at new insights, loving the “a-ha” moments when I finally “got” what the poet’s image was all about, weeping at the unvarnished treatment of death in some poems which evoked sorrows of my own, and loving the intimacy of sharing so many events with a woman I had met only briefly but whom I now know better than some of my “closest” friends. I have reread most of these poems now, and have found ever more subtleties to admire in each line. Andrea Cohen is a communicator, a woman who speaks from the heart without treacly sentiment, a poet so skilled in all the arts of poesy that she can match her metrics to the cadences of everyday speech. Many poems offer unique points of view, while some recall Cohen’s childhood, her family, and the important moments in her early life in the South—from saying thank you to the trash pick-up man to listening to her sister during the year that her sister sang everything from directions on how to tie shoes to the obituaries of people she had never met. Andrea Cohen is a poet whose imagery and clarity of vision combine with the clean structure of her language and verse to create poems which communicate on all levels, some of them humorous, some of them ineffably sad, and all of them unique.
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Paul Chowder has just compiled an anthology of poetry which he hopes will, one day, be used as the comprehensive anthology for college writing classes and as a source of pleasure by all those who savor the music of language. Choosing the poems for the anthology was, for him, “like [being] that blond bitch-goddess on Project Runway,” and he must now write the forty-page introduction. His publisher is desperate for it, and Chowder has writer’s block. As he thinks about his unwritten introduction, he skitters from perceptive comments about poetry and the creative life to mundane annoyances, juxtaposing unlikely subjects which keep the reader surprised and entertained. In a voice so “human” he sounds like an alterego for author Nicholson Baker, Chowder demystifies poetry—and plums—making often hilarious comments about the structure of language, the history of poetry, the lives of famous poets, and about his own struggles. His free-flowing, not-quite-stream-of-consciousness style allows him to connect contemporary culture (and the reader) with the most serious academic subjects. Chock full of “a-ha” moments, the novel is a treasure trove of information and observation about poetry and poets, told with robust humor.
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Lively images of the cat (shunra) and the butterfly (schmetterling) chase and play through the memories of a poetic child as Yoel Hoffmann, one of Israel’s most celebrated poets, takes us to another time and place and recreates childhood and the coming of age. More than sixty years have passed since the speaker first lived in Ramat Gan, and the passage of time has intensified some memories, eliminated the irrelevancies from others, and connected the fantasies of childhood with the perennial mysteries of adulthood. Nature imagery—of birds, animals, clouds, and the sky—permeate this expressionistic painting of a poet’s life, giving depth and color to instants in time and to moments in history. As intense, compressed and sometimes elusive as the speaker’s memories are, the story—and our picture of the author—gradually emerge, insinuating themselves into our own consciousness and speaking directly to us. The effect is unforgettable, a powerful communication between author and reader, transcending time and place.
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