The Language of Two (Finishing Line Press, 2026) by Jean Flanagan

The Language of Two (Finishing Line Press, 2026) by Jean Flanagan

reviewed by Lee Varon


Jean Flanagan’s latest collection of poetry “The Language of Two” brings us breathtaking poems of remembrance, loss, acceptance, and paying homage. Her finely crafted lyrics help us see how to live a rich and fulfilling life, despite intense moments of grief.

Several poems in the collection illuminate the lives of women lost to history such as Clover Adams, the wife of historian Henry Adams (“In the Shadow of Suicide”) and in the title poem (“The Language of Two”) which is written in the voice of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron. I had never heard that Ada was credited, by some, as the world’s first computer programmer.

But it is Flanagan’s deeply honest and moving personal poems that had the most lasting impression for me. These poems are rich with stunning and memorable details. “Your Letter Fell into the Trash” depicts a letter from a former lover mixed with trash, stained by mayonnaise—in which the only still legible phrase is: “I love you but—”.

In “Ballad of Goodbye at Ardmore” the poet writes:

“I hear you hum this old love song/ and wonder if you know the words/ of our first good-bye”.

Some of Flanagan’s poems felt like an arrow piercing the heart: the exquisitely detailed images of a wedding that never took place in “Blue Wedding Dress” where the poet writes: “The dress was royal blue lace/ ankle length with diamond sequins./ Perfect for a second wedding” and then the poem goes on to tell us, “I was to wear it to St. Jerome’s Chapel/ at the end of Lake Street/ for the mass.” It is the specificity of this poem that makes it so heartbreaking as the narrator tells us exactly how the wedding would have taken place but never did.

In “My Sister’s Foot” the poet begins jauntily: “I am obsessed with shoes, / smooth red suede heels/ 3 inches high. /Navy blue leather flats.../Sandals with diamond and gold bling/ Sneakers for tennis. /I hate Mary Jane’s/ the unsightly strap. No style there.” But after this cheerful beginning, in the second paragraph we are suddenly gobsmacked by the lines: “My sister asks me to put a gold flat shoe/ on her titanium black mechanical foot.” The shoe the narrator struggles to put on doesn’t fit and she is forced to return it to the closet full of shoes her sister will never wear, “steps she’ll never take.”

Peppered among the many permutations of loss which Flanagan so masterfully portrays, there are transcendent poems of lightness and joy as in the three short stanzas of “I Am Startled by This Love.” How beautifully the poet shows us her wonder and joy at new love: “as faithful as snow/ as curious as the hawk/ that lands on /the antenna across the way.”

The Language of Two is available from Finishing Line Press, Amazon, and can be ordered from your local bookstore.

         

In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

 

In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

REVIEW BY LEE VARON

In this exquisite collection, poet Ruth Chad interweaves her keen attention to the details of our natural world with deep emotions of love, loss, joy, and grief.

Many of the poems in this collection (divided into three sections) focus on the poet’s mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s before she succumbed to the disease in her 90s. These poems read like journal entries with often just dates for titles

I imagine witnessing a loved one fall into the depths of dementia must be heart-wrenching as one sees the person becoming unmoored from their former life. Chad captures this brilliantly in such poems as:

April 24:

Last night I dreamt of mermaids

in the surf

on the white

wild mane of the waves

and floating mussels

with no flesh

no byssus attached

Byssus refers to the protein threads that attach mollusks, such as mussels, to solid surfaces.

What a perfect image of her mother, a shell of her former self, totally unable to attach to anything in the world around her.

Chad is not afraid to plumb the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship. In If Only, she laments the strictures of her mother’s life.

…Long after her death

I will wish

that my mother had been freed

of the yellow walls

of our split level

that she could have walked

calmly away

from the turquoise kitchen

apron trailing behind her in the grass

that she could have walked

calmly away

into the moonrise

and left a path

for me

Chad’s poems are a testament of how we go on, how we manage devastating things and come to terms with them. One thing poetry can do so well is help us survive difficult times and certainly Chad’s poems provide this solace. Through her poetry, she illustrates how it feels to see a loved one slip into illness and infirmity, but she also shows us how one takes in the fullness of another’s life and, in so doing, transmutes this loss into a triumph of the spirit.

These poems are artfully crafted with deceptive simplicity. Often, Chad dispenses with punctuation altogether and the beauty of her words on the page shines forth with its power and resonance. Most of these poems are no longer than a page and among these the poet intersperses haiku and other short poems which serve to crystallize her message as in this poem after her mother’s passing:

February 14

I cried when I dropped the teacup

robin’s egg blue

shattered shards of china

on my kitchen floor

it was yours

No extra words slow the conveyance of the deep emotion in such poems.

There are poems in this collection about travel, the process of aging, and about other family members. All of these are imbued with Chad’s keen attention to the natural world and breathtaking images as in lines from Life in the Pandemic:

A hundred sparrows

gather in the firs flutter

against each other

feathers bronze umber

their chatter

fills the lilac sky…

And in another poem Ice After a Storm, the poet writes:

I shudder

in chill crusty morning

awed by the cold fist of sun

and how small I am

standing here

under the great loud beeches

like a girl in the circus crowd

the wild universe

whirling around me

Certainly, the poems in this enduring collection engender an equal sense of awe.

Lee Varon is a social worker and writer. Her latest poetry book is The Last Bed (2024). She has written two children’s books about substance use disorder: My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery (2021) and: A Kids Book About Overdose (2024).

Red Letter Poem #233

  The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #233

 

 

 

 

Geese

 

                “Sometimes a long-dead friend stops by for a while.”

       –Wislawa Szymborska

 

 

I climb the branches

& disappear into white pear blossoms

                                          for a while.

 

I listen to the low honking of geese

flying through opaque clouds

                                          for a while.

 

I pretend your hand turning the doorknob

as you come to see me will last

                                          for a while.

 

 

                                     ––Lee Varon

 

 

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over. . .

 

This is, of course, from Robert Frost’s “Birches.”  Overwhelmed by the world’s unrelenting claim upon him, the poet entertained the desire to simply flee, to create a momentary mindscape he could occupy in order to gain perspective, soothe the heart, breathe slow.  Perhaps you’re feeling something similar these days––shaken by extraordinary circumstances that seem to, from time to time, define our personal and family lives.  Or, if you’re enjoying one of those marvelous periods where the path ahead is broad and sunlit, and simple delights abound, all it might take is a glance at the morning headlines to send you toppling, fearful for what’s happening to our country as a whole, let alone the beleaguered planet.  And so Lee Varon’s diminutive tercets might be just the thing to calm your throbbing head and palpitating heart.  Having read this (seemingly) simply poem a dozen times, I find I am hesitant to say too much about it, for fear of chasing the magic away.  But perhaps, if I confide to you just a few of my responses, I‘ll gain a bit more clarity as to why this poem has touched me as it has––and you’ll let me know if you too fell under its spell.

 

Right from the title, the scene is being set.  The sound of the geese leaving: here in New England, that hollow-sounding haronk signals the inescapable approach of winter.  We’ll often stop what we’re doing and look up––and, watching that wavering V arrowing across the gray skies, it always seems to me like a signature, an official seal on a document the body’s already been studying for weeks. Then there’s the Szymborska epigraph, a poet who always makes dazzling leaps of the imagination seem matter-of-fact.  And right from there, I knew which imagined faces I might be seeing on my front step, expecting entrance.  I was so glad that Lee never specified who it was she envisioned in her doorway, making that shadowy visit––she leaves that detail and others for the reader to supply.  Then I picture myself climbing into the blossoming pear, and the surrounding cloud of white petals brings to mind both beauty and oblivion.  I find myself entering the what-if of the verses––branches, geese, and then that hand on the doorknob––and there are so many possibilities for healing, hope. . .but each of the stanzas concludes with that simple refrain, “for a while.”   What we desire is held in abeyance, set to the side, yielding reluctantly to reality.  A dream, a memory, a poem can restore that irretrievable loss––but only for the briefest of moments.  Then the geese vanish, the clouds cover over, and we return to the work at hand.

 

Frost spoke of the desire to make one’s vocation and avocation a single enterprise; most of us strive for this with varying degrees of success.  I think Lee’s occupation as a social worker and her work as a poet and prose writer have allowed her to practice a similar sort of attention to the world, its suffering and tentative joys; and it underscores the need for compassion throughout.  Lee was the winner of the 19th Annual Briar Cliff Review Fiction contest, and her poetry and short stories have appeared in a host of literary venues.  Her collection Shot in the Head was awarded the Sunshot Poetry Prize.  Finishing Line Press, who published her very first chapbook, has just brought out The Last Bed, a volume of poetry that deals with “the roller coaster ride” that is living with a family member suffering from what’s now termed ‘substance use disorder.’  Perhaps the entirety of this new collection serves as a sanctuary from some of the pain and losses she’s experienced––but I am pleased that, in the end, Lee arrived where Frost did: at reengagement and renewed love.  “May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return.  Earth’s the right place for love:/ I don’t know where it's likely to go better.”  And neither do I.

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

"Lunch in Chinatown" by Mary Bonina

REVIEW BY LEE VARON

Mary Bonina’s latest chapbook “Lunch in Chinatown” (Cervena Barva Press,2024), is a window into the lives of immigrants who come to this country seeking a new beginning. In her work as an ESL teacher Bonina taught English to adult students from all over the world .

I wish everyone in our country could read “Lunch in Chinatown” and have a glimpse at how hard those coming to the U. S. struggle to learn the language and culture and forge a fresh start— many fleeing unspeakable atrocities in their native lands. In “the makeshift classroom” at the edge of Chinatown in downtown Boston, Bonina met with her students.

As you can imagine, with students from all over the world , all trying to learn English, lessons often go off-topic and into interesting new areas . Or as Bonina writes “Someone always gets a discussion moving/ on a different track, a related subject,/ one that comes with its own set of problems.”

And sometimes Bonina, as teacher, becomes enthralled with the stories her students bring to class, as when Andre , one of the Haitian men in class, tells the story of when he met his wife in the streets of Port au Prince. You can almost feel the electrifying moment as : “He puts me on that bright street brimming with activity in Port / au Prince. I can see Giselle a young girl with her friends all standing / around her. They don’t giggle . They feign aloofness/ And Andre approaches the group, as he approaches his English class:/ shyly and respectfully. “

Or in the powerful poem , “Teaching the Past Tense” when all of her students chime in with the names of the countries where they came from: “Haiti. Guatemala. Ethiopia. China.”
A benign run of the mill lesson ends with the devastating stanza: “Hagos, the Ethiopian says — not somberly,/ just matter-of-factly—‘My country./ Lots of people dead.’”

Bonina has a wonderful ability to mix short lyrical lines with longer prose-like lines. This reminded me of the way so many of her lessons must have gone— some short and to the point and others discursive and taking many twists and turns .

One of the most moving poems was the title poem “Lunch in Chinatown.” In this poem one of Bonina’s students— Wei Wei— takes her arm as they walk , the day after Christmas, along the sidewalks “slippery with snow and ice.” Teacher and student are going to a restaurant to order Dim Sum—“The air was bitter cold ,/ smoky and scented with ginger and sesame,”.

Looking down, Bonina notices that her student “wore bright yellow summer shoes,/ like ballet shoes, but with hard soles.” Wei Wei, she learns, had “worked as a doctor / in China’s largest hospital.”
It seems that her fear of falling on the slippery sidewalks and holding onto Bonina is a metaphor for how these new immigrants hold onto these English language classes, and their teacher, to help negotiate living in their sometimes precarious and often confusing new world .

This is a richly imagistic and meaningful book of poems that speaks to our shared humanity beyond cultural and linguistic differences. Though only twenty- six pages, it is packed full of memorable vignettes that resonate long after we close its pages.

Lee Varon is the author of “My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery,” and “A Kid’s Book About Overdose.”
She is co-editor of “Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness.”

Red Letter Poem #203

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #203

 

 

 

Dunlin

 

 

Its breeding plumage so bright

it looks like a different bird

 

just as you in rehab,

or soon after,

 

glowed

with light

 

only to twist again,

dun-colored, into addiction.

 

I wanted to keep that light—

you and I circling the rehab

 

by the horse stables

as you tell me your roommate OD’d.

 

Before leaving I stand before the Memorial Wall:

See you in Heaven/Our forever angel/ Miss you, Daddy—

 

hearts cracked in two.

I retrieve my car keys, cell phone, to head home.

 

Stop time, God!

I yell in my empty car

 

as traffic slows on the Mass Pike

and ahead, blue lights flash.

 

 

               ––Lee Varon

 

 

 

In the catalog of human anguish, certainly near the very top of the list must be the experience of helplessness.  And to my mind, that powerless feeling is more painfully acute when it concerns someone we love––even more so than for our own suffering.  Perhaps a mother’s empathetic connection with her child merits its own special category––and it’s precisely what we’re witnessing in Lee Varon’s new poem “Dunlin.”  In a way, addiction is like a slow-motion car crash––a careening toward disaster, drawn out over months, even years––and loved ones are forced to witness the calamity, hearts constantly bracing for what may be that final point of impact.  At the outset of the poem, our hearts lift a bit with the thought of the Dunlin’s breeding plumage, imagining the long-beaked shore bird resplendent with rust and black stippling across his back.  It’s a reminder that love (or the need for it) has the power to transform.  But again and again, it seems, her son slips back beneath the pain-gray cloak of addiction––and the mention of some other unfortunate soul’s overdose can’t help but chill us at the core.  When the narrator is once again alone in her car, the unbearable pain overwhelms and she screams out for some divine intervention, for time itself to cease––a balm which (at least for this poem) is not granted.  Instead, those flashing police lights on the stalled Turnpike remind us that tragedy may befall any fragile being at any moment, though still we must try to continue on our way.

 

Lee is an award-winning writer of poetry and prose, as well as a social worker by profession.  She won the 19th Annual Briar Cliff Review Fiction contest, and her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous fine journals.  In 2017, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Affairs Run in the Family and, the following year, she won the Sunshot Poetry Prize for her book, Shot in the Head.  Today’s poem will appear in a forthcoming collection entitled The Last Bed (Finishing Line Press.)  Lee also authored a children’s book about substance abuse disorder: My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery.

 

In another of Lee’s poems, these lines appear: “my poems are small flags/ waving on a red hillside”––and I believe that icon speaks to something essential within her work.  Of course, there is a certain ambiguity about the flags in question: are they ‘red flags’ coloring the hillside––a traditional warning about danger, even impending disaster (and today’s poem is certainly intended to focus our attention on the awful cost of not addressing the opioid crisis engulfing our nation.)  But if the hillside is red on its own, then flags fluttering could be a metaphor for the wildflowers in spring, the ultimate sign of hopefulness––and hope is, quite often, the only response to/remedy for helplessness.  In fact, the very act of transforming a moment of suffering into ink on the page displays an ultimate faith in this confounding existence; it imagines that the writer with the pen in her hand is slightly removed from her counterpart on the page (achieving, perhaps, some slight elevation where the shift in perspective can’t help but broaden our understanding.)  It even envisions the possibility of other eyes who will, sometime, confront these written lines and take their bearings from what has been shared.  Some may even be survivors of a calamity like this one (as is, I am happy to report, Lee’s son), and wish to celebrate the fact that those red flags have miraculously evolved into red-letter days. 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner