Empire's End by Peter Crowley

 

REVIEW BY KAREN KLEIN

The poems in Peter Crowley’s Empire’s End reflect the divided consciousness expressed in the difference between the image on the front cover and the image on the first page with the title. Pick up the book and face the stark guillotine, an image of execution most associated with the French Revolution, but also used by Nazi Germany. Crowley’s sharp social critique has the force of a blade while the next page’s image is that of a laughing Buddha, the logo of the publisher. The  Buddha’s geniality appears in the poems that involve the natural world, a place that contains both threat and consolation.

 

Filling out the implications of the cover image, the poem, Guillotine starts with a sarcastic tone, praising it as a fine instrument…it's sharp blade, an improvement upon/ the sword as it falls mechanically. That term indicates machine as opposed to human, presenting a negative view of the instrument. But this reviewer’s impression of sarcasm was short lived as the guillotine is praised for its ability to decapitate both rulers and ruled. The poet hypothesizes that it would be fine were it to be reinstated to deal with the swine..that causes steel rain to fall on people’s heads, whose spears are hurled at those who do not kneel. Crowley speculates it would be fine if those who/deliver mass death in the 21st Century knew of Louis XVI’s fate. The poet’s guillotine is a warning to those who rule now to remember that they too can be overthrown.

 

The poet’s fierce political and social critique, published in 2023, includes many poems written during Covid, a pandemic that involved societies in turbulent chaos.

Given this historical timing, the poems, for example Spring 2020, show the harms done and the pain caused not only by an industrial, oligarchic ruling class dominating the  ‘people’ but also by virus, attacking patients’ ability to breathe, forcing them into ventilators to survive, making the overworked doctors cry to themselves and the nurses go without N95 masks thus likely to contract corona. As in the poem, Worker Evolution, Crowley is a voice for workers and against abuses by those who control, in this case, the hospital owners. His plea for workers’  rights is evidenced in Train-- this machine to replace you with initial repetition on the stanzas: We bring you up/to bring you down. The “We” is personified by a 19th century railroad magnate who, in the poem The Lord’s Work, waves at The Lord who grinned back, giving a thumbs-up. Our systems of exploitation gets a heavenly permission.

 

Spring 2020 not only contains harsh social critique, but also introduces natural imagery in the pun on rabbit ears as the TV antennae and the animal. Crowley’s imagery ranges easily between our social world and nature’s world wherein the yellow bird sings:  /And how it sings/Yes, how it sings…. Repetition, often anaphora, for emphasis here and elsewhere is one of Crowley’s poetic devices to indicate urgency to awaken us, his readers/auditors, to the injustices about which the bird sings. Nature is given sentience to understand threat and to warn us and to feel pain as in the personification poem, Bird Injury. The bird speaks of its injured beak which he describes as a weapon which he used to stab a beetle before hitting a rock. This bird could stand-in for any violent human action that ricochets back. Maybe the violent get what they deserve, or ought to.

Sometimes, though, the non-human inhabitants get harmed. In Grass Cutting, another blade like that of the guillotine is the lawnmower’s ironically titled, civilized blade. Nevertheless…the ants below/look up in peril.

 

Contrasting the poems of social critique is Crowley’s strong sense of the importance of community; not the community of the oppressed workers, but of our neighbors and friends. In Shoveling, for example, the poetics of repetition give way to synecdoche:

Soft frigid white/makes rubber spin out/ and feet fall on their back/ Snow creates problems for car wheels and people slip and fall. The shovel itself is described as an enlarged prehistoric spoon. It has a blade, like the guillotine, but this blade doesn’t create harm or justice. It helps create community. When it stops biting into white pavement, conversation burgeons as the neighbors shoveling realize for a second/that we’re all in this together. Open mics, too, create community in a local hangout in Lynn, Massachusetts. The poet, probably one of the regulars, devotes a poem to describing many of the varied characters who come there to read, to make music. These regulars aren’t a generic class; they’re individuals.

 

Entering into community also can bring sadness as in the poem that references the disappearance and murder of a local young girl 23 years ago. After 3 years, her body was found; the murderer has never been found. In a stunning line, Crowley’s imagery unites her body, the natural surround, possibly locus of the murder, and the failure to find justice: The forest’s internal organs bleed an impenetrable silence.

 

In a book of urgent political critique and empathic descriptions of community, there are also deeply personal poems. Poems that speak of multiple travels, of a Bond wherein the speaker can rest my eyes on you/in the morning. And that is enough, or when it  isn’t And you still/ Break my heart. Poems about bodily frailties like illness and aging ,the awareness of the fear of the ultimate loss--the self….consumed by nothing’s screaming silence from the poem Dying.

 

The poem Coming to expresses awareness of the practice and burden of writing: Memories severed from language….Coming to something unformed, unknown, grasping more, slowly, and again not knowing. Grasping and unable to hold. The good poem offers advice: to know birth is an accident and life absurd and sees the act of writing poetry as transferring to paper the universal thousand-pound cinderblock weight. Perhaps the ability to show the truth of accident and absurdity makes a poem good. Crowley ends this challenging and rewarding collection of poems with a poem that unites Human Being who: 

Like lioness, lady slipper, elephant and redwood/You will do what you need/To survive/ Like all of us.

 

Karen Klein, author of This Close(Ibbetson Press); Associate Professor Emerita, Brandeis

University

ETH.... by Elizabeth Gordon Mckim

 

ETH by Elizabeth Gordon McKim

REVIEW BY KAREN KLEIN

elizabETHeridge a Memoir in Poetry, Song, and Story with Previously Unpublished Poems by Etheridge Knight evades categorization. Yes, it is all the materials listed as contents, but it is a life story, a love story, a brief biography, photographs, many poems handwritten, published, a partnership of a decade, a memory that will last forever. The accident of their overlapping names Elizabeth and Etheridge gave a name ETH to the creation of a new entity: what they made, and were, and are together. They crossed racial. economic, geographic backgrounds and boundaries: Elizabeth-- white, well-educated, New England, new poet; Etheridge--black, educated in jail, the military, Mississippi to Indiana, well-known in poetry communities; --to live their story ‘bout you and me and Freedom too.



All you need to know about Etheridge’s life and death is told in 1 chapter in prose, broken by Elizabeth’s poem :There is a man/Inside me/As terrible/As myself  and a fewshort poems. She wrote the poem before she met him, but realized once they met at a poetry conference, that it was written for him. The specific important dates of their decade, 1981-1991, from their meeting to his death on March 10 from lung cancer are subtly placed in the flow of information; perhaps subtly because exact chronology is less important than experience remembered, reimagined, refelt in the heart and bones of the ups and downs and honest intensity of physical intimacy, his addiction, alcoholism, their distances, separation, reunion. At the end, she held him dying. His death parted their bodies, but never their spirit souls.



They met in poetry; “we were both deeply ensconced in the Oral Tradition of Poetry; we
both felt the sounds and the dance and the language at work in ourselves and in the people and in the uni / verse. We were both doing our poeting in the community, both Free People doing what we do in our various ways, and all ways listening to the messages.” In Elizabeth’s poem paducah, written for Etheridge, she describes the term,maybe unfamiliar to many readers:



it is a calling



its poeting

getting the message out

taking the people through

the pain and the suffering the suffocating

the in / justice the long dank hours

the march to the sea of vision



For them, the activity of poeting was Getting the people/ into the poem/ into the message.

In racist America, poeting is political. In an epigraph to chance dancer Etheridge wrote:



I don’t feel

like I got cancer

I feel like a dancer

and tho’ there’s not much music

what li’l there is

I use it.


The remaining 9 chapters are containers for poems by Elizabeth that follow the trajectory of the risk-taking bridge of their passionate connection and poems by Etheridge, many unpublished. He uses the self-image of a bear, as the sign on the door of a room where he was writing: This / is / the Lair Of “de smoking Bear”. A fascinating image, true and contradictory. Bear could be a dangerous animal or the image of Smokey the Bear, the kindly watcher over forests and kids to be careful of fire or playing with fire. Etheridge did care for kids, his and those of his former women. Elizabeth writes she wasn’t his Alpha, but she was his Omega, the last one. But a bear who struggles with addiction and alcoholism not easy. Despite that, their connecting bridge swayed, sometimes perilously separating, but never broke.



Etheridge’s rhythmic, vibrant poems are for/to Elizabeth. In [ms e ---- o miz e ], hand-written on the letterhead stationary of the American Poetry Review (he was on the Board of Advisors), the slashes between words may represent breaks for breath; the poem is in the voice, the delivery, the ir/regularity of the metrical mix of iambs, anapests, trochees, the violence of longing:



Can’t you hear me / howling / down

your name? The sound, the sound

of the wind in my ears

does not blow

the same as before…

a winter thunder now rolls across my shore.

Don’t you love me anymore?---O

Elizabetheridge, Lady of my autumn dream years,

I desire the humming of your heart, the blow

-- O the great blow blow of your breath,



In o Elizabeth he addresses her as "Woman of my wanderings--Wife of my comings and
goings/ Sister of my rap and rhyme, indicating her centrality to his life and creative maker/sharer of his poetry. and asks Do you still love me? Is/ my smoke still in your fire?"



Elizabeth, too, represents the honest, intense physicality of their connection. In eros, she 
evokes the bear and sex in slang and sweetness:



Southern bear lumbers

Home up and around my trail,

Roots for hope n’honey



I’ve always been moist

And a sucker for love. Out

Pourings. Hidden Springs.



Unbutton my silk blouse.

Two small wonders fall out in-

To your honey paws.



Elizabeth’s poems chart the last February/March 1991 of Etheridge’s life. A marvel of observation, of loving, they are a record of those who came to his bedside, who sang,-read poems, kept watch. They honor the bonds of family and friends. From her poems beyond words to when I held you dying, we listen and learn how to hold someone you love dying, and how without sentimentality, language can tell your truth and bring you through:



I hold you from behind

With my arms around you

My hands on your heart

You birth into me

As you die

And

I live into you

as you birth into death

your weight finally flopping like a fish into my arms your breathing

light and lighter still

we are in the shallows now

as you leave the water

and make your way to the faraway country

your gasps and convulsions

moving into me

rhythmically

as I breathe into you

and you breathe out

into the big sea of silence

where I cannot follow



Unique is an overused word in our advertising culture, but its literal meaning needs to be respected. It means there is nothing else like it. ETH is an important book; there is nothing else like it in its organization, its contents, its message. It honors the struggle and rewards of making love in the fullest sense of that world and the need to make and share poetry in intimacy and in community.



After years of creating this unique book, Elizabeth writes that she is ready to move on now. “It’s time. I need to, and I know Etheridge would want me to. I have named what I know as best as I can. I have taken the time to tell the stories and I was careful in the telling, as he advised.” From this reader, thank you; it’s a gift.

 

 

Karen Klein   11/7/2023

Review of Dear So and So by Rusty Barnes

 

Review of Dear So and So by Rusty Barnes

Review by Karen Klein

If you are a visual person, when you open Dear So and So and leaf through it you will be struck by the stanzaic forms of most of the poems. Most of them are sonnets-- 3 quatrains and a couplet--,but poet Rusty Barnes enjoys playing with the form, sometimes adding a line,taking a couple of lines away. The reader will see this playfulness runs throughout this book of love poems; he even includes a poem expressly titled, Not a Love Poem.

The poet has chosen the appropriate form in which to express love; after all that’s where the sonnet form began with the medieval Italian, Provencal poets in their expressions of longing for the beloved, appeals for just a look, just a touch. Whether these poets were truly in love with the beloved object--often a woman socially superior, therefore inaccessible--we don’t know. But as W.H. Auden wrote, “…a person’s statement of belief is no proof of belief, any more than a love poem is proof that that one is in love.” Shakespeare used the sonnet form in English to extend and describe more complex feelings of love--magic, mystery, misery. Barnes writes in this spirit, bringing a unique voice to a literary tradition.

The poems in Dear So and So are in the form of letters, but to whom are they addressed? The dedication is ‘to Heather’, but who is Heather--wife, lover, a single person, a composite of many? The first poem, Marriage for All Ages, punning perhaps on Ages as forever or the age of the couple, opens with a prose-like, five line stanza, describing a maybe fortunate or not sexual encounter. Describing his sexual technique, which guarantees her orgasm as “the Force-5 Forklift Flip,” he is hopeful his partner will marry him, “but two days later you sacked me as your boyfriend/because I didn’t like ‘sex’.” Barnes’ tone here is typical of his throughout--self-deprecating, but leavened with honesty and humor. Not shying away from sexual imagery, he ends his poem which includes a car accident with a deer and an allusion to jail with a declaration of his loving need: “Let your breasts hang from your shirt when you bail/me; smother me with the great guns of love.” How many poets can make a love poem like that?

There is the power of desire in “Dear So and So: the door remains too open” with its plea “teach me again what it means to be loved” from a man “bent on his own destruction.” There also is the sad despair in The Deep Dark Ditch of Love, Or What a Woman Says that She Doesn’t Mean, but on the facing page Vegetable Love: “ Dear So and So: at wholesale prices my love/might be worth five bucks and a fat cracker. Stop teasing. Break down the ways I refuse/to become a reasonably rational adult.” It is the speaker who is teasing, because it is a ‘reasonably rational adult’ who ends this poem: “We loved body to body like leaves,/ the wind always waving us goodbye,/or hello.Yes, hello. Yes love. Yes.” This resounding affirmations rings throughout literature, echoing Molly Bloom’s “Yes I said again, yes” ending Joyce’s Ulysses.

Rusty Barnes’ poems run the gamut from that affirmation to the Bondage Poem which imagines a phantasy of a woman tied down; this image serving as stimulation: “…I’ll take myself in hand anyway. For love.” What, as Tina Turner sung, “does love have to do with it?” For Barnes, it must be part if the mystery and complexity of our sexual, emotional, heartfelt, and instinctual needs. And their domestication as in The Man Addresses the Fight, its Aftermath and the Makeup Sex which ends “Bless the children who coitus interruptus us. Kiss their steamy wet/heads and tuck them in between us; we can continue at dawn.

Burn Out poems by Stephen Honig

Review by Karen Klein

Reading Stephen Honig’s fifth book of poems, Burn-out, this reader is struck by the author’s voice. He is conversational, addressing the reader directly, telling us if we seek certainty, don’t read his poems in Section 1“About Myself “which he admits is “much confused.” He is an astute observer of self and the ordinary dilemmas of being an aging human, caught in our historic period and this United States. Sometimes laconic, dismissive, wry, he always questions without getting or giving answers, but sometimes good advice. One such is “be careful when you choose to clean your closets basements/attics back rooms…you are asking for a dialogue with time. “

This advice is taken from the first poem in Section 1 Memory of Objects--because “my objects/have memories” which the poet needs “to tell me who I was/before I am myself.” We can wonder what he means about “myself”; aren’t we always ourselves, no matter how old? Perhaps he means his changing self as in Process of Erosion when he became conscious of his “new self” and “opted to be the real me--/but could not find him anymore.” Here’s mystery: who is this “real me?” Perhaps only the objects that have memories can tell him, but as he asserts at Summer Beach‘s end “There is no danger as perilous as memory.”

The dangers he alludes to are succinctly expressed in the brutal Thoughts on Vacation: “Vacation is rebellion against what it is we do/when we do the things we do…a revel of freedom/…fear of returning home/a crushing sense of what awaits--/home never takes a vacation.” What crushes is his sense of “personal malaise” expressed in The Dirges: “thinking of church tomorrow/ when God will explain/why when I cried no one came” and from Careful Woman: “I do not want to tell you more,/it just brings out my pain/of nights alone, sitting at home/with time to fail again.” These last two poems are from Section 2 “About My Women,” a chronicle of leavings and losses, disappointments and sorrows. But Summer Beach also contains close observation of the physical surround and bodies loving: “smells of cocoa butter and peanut butter”,”we lay so close your sweat/ran down my arms and legs./…your breath exhaled clams and garlic/into my nostrils./…feeling sand between our hips as/we were together in the dune.”

There is so much pain in the first two sections, I expected Section 3 “About Pain” to be a continuation. But the poet surprises and moves to history. He tells us that pain is “a fundamental component of life.” He refers us to his late father who “was wont to say when unhappy about something: ‘I’m not complaining, I’m only reporting.” He reports “icicles drip into the hearts of men,” tells of “kid’s blood in the alley,…the old lady full of virus dead in her room with no one to care/”and realizes “to look at the truth, well/who gives a shit/I ask you.”

Honig’s Section 4 “About Death” moves to the theme that has shadowed the earlier sections. He chronicles writing condolence letters, lists the “common wisdom about life and death,” including ‘Life sucks and then you die” a quote from Voltaire,” We never live; we are always in the expectation of living,” and the oft-expressed truth: “it is always too soon.” He addresses the Jewish philosopher, Spinoza with “Apologies” as he tries to sort out belief, questions about looking for god, does god exist, does the poet’s life or death matter, does it relate to god, what use is “the silence of gods.” There is no answer, just the knowledge that he, like all of us, will at some point die. This fifth book was published when he was 80. Increasingly aware of his aging, with a sly smile he promises us he when he has something more to say about his age, he will put it in his next book.

Section 5 contains poems that Honig feels do not fall into the categorizations that have structured the first 4 sections, but many of these poems carry the feelings and themes of the previous ones: a dream that leaves him with “only a melancholy I cannot understand.”, “the disease of being American.” , “to assert understanding robs you a vision/of the reasons you always fail.” In this section he dialogues with another heavy hitter, Soren Kierkegaard and the unanswered questions are the most provocative raised in the book. The poet’s tone is playful, serio-comic, he teases Kierkegaard by riffing on his famous title Fear and Trembling: “Is it what you feel when God tests you,…

Or is it how you feel today, /or every day?” “Is your fear a test--and of what?/ Who was there, to ask Isaac?/ Well, God but he’s not telling."

I found two poems that spoke from the core of this poet in his combination of humor, sometimes flippant, but deadly serious. From different sections, they both refer to death, to the maybe afterlife. The first, Red Bicycle is a narrative that will resonate with persons of a certain age who have been kids when the most desired gift was a Schwinn bike. It is a narrative about his getting a Schwinn Black Panther which was stolen when he was a boy in Brooklyn riding up Dead Man’s Hill and attached by a gang. The poem begins with his wish to be buried with his Schwinn as he describes the many ways his corpse might be disposed of. He doesn’t care if his dead body is buried in a casket, cremated, or thrown to the sea, from the heart of his loving memory, he wants the bike to be back with him “working horn in its compartment./ Please make sure that the horn batteries are fresh--/you might never know when you might want to signal.”

The second, The Jewish Joke, interestingly enough, is from Section 1 About Myself. It took me a while to get it, to hold its full power, its bitterness, its suffering, its truth about “centuriesthat can only be explained by a shrug of the shoulders.”

“The joke:

Two dead Jews arrive at heaven’s gates

and await their entrance interview.

At one point they break out in laughter.

G-d unused to such things, made inquiry:

“Wherefore dost thou jest over some event from life?”

“Oh,”one dead man replied as if chatting with a friend over

Passover wine,

“--you wouldn’t understand--

you had to be there.”

This Close Poems by Karen Klein

 

This Close

Poems by Karen Klein

Ibbetson Street Press, 2022

Review - Marcus Breen

Hilary Mantel the late, brilliant English writer who novelized the life of Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII and his six English wives in the trilogy, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light, said in 2020 that she could not have written the way she did when she was young, because “experience weighs heavy.” In other words, there is a point in life when it becomes possible to write knowledgably about the psychosocial aspects of human existence. In loftier terms, drawing on psychoanalytic categories, pieces of meaning about life fall somewhat together as age gives its unique perspective. This is not to say that young people cannot write. Rather, it is to say that wisdom is an affordance that emerges with age. Ask any sage.

Which brings me to Karen Klein’s first book of poems, This Close. In her 80s, Klein brings the reflective wisdom of age to her poetry. It is revealed in an infatuation with the process of unpacking her life. As she noted before a reading in Newton, Massachusetts, on 13 September 2022, her poems are about “romance and its difficulties,” “relationship difficulties.” As an octogenarian, unpacking anything from the messy world of one’s social life involves some risk taking in the disclosures that unfold, as the writer engages in a targeted form of self-exploration, with an important caveat: the writer must have the poetic capacity to convey life’s difficulties. Klein reveals that capacity, in this, her first book of poetry.

Because Klein’s poems are offered from her position as an older or aged person, her poems add to human knowledge drawn from a lifetime of observation about the difficulties of being human. The willingness of her poems wanders into the fraught feelings of life in the social relations she had and expects to continue. It’s a book of the history of memory, recollected as encounters underpinned with the good fortune that allows her to be at the age she is and still writing.

The collection is separated into five sections of poems of different lengths, all following a relatively free verse form. Section one, the curvature of a line consists of two poems, the first in the book “Journal 2017: Bilbao,” places the reader in relation to the sense of history-memory, rediscovered by an association through architecture and movement. This one, the swinging bridge in Bilbao, Spain returns the poet to memories of swinging, to create for the child, “the excitement of reaching.” The following poem “Takeoff,” continues the idea of the trajectory from childhood, a concept rich in psychoanalytical resonances, especially when it is connected with art such as the Brancusi bird sculpture Klein saw with she visited MoMA for the first time as a 17 year old.

see the sculpture

—my breath catches itself—

the free curvature of our bodies

without an image of the body

the desired roundness of flesh

embodied

in the curvature of a line.

The following sections are: skin/has its own/vocabulary, use words to find my tribe, They won’t come back next year, and road to nowhere/and everywhere.

The coming of age theme is to be expected in a first book of poems, as the pent up words of dozens of years emerge, as if in liberation after much gestation.

Of particular note in this respect is the poem for the artist Georgia O’Keefe, where Klein, digging way back into the era where correct language for a woman meant no profanity, explains the sensation when using the word “cunt” for the first time, to refer to her own private body. In “Black Iris,” ostensibly a poem about flowers, the effect is that O’Keefe’s flower is translated into a sensibility about Klein’s body.

walked out of the Metropolitan Museum

walked naked to myself

recognized my body in the flower

the iris intimately in me

knew I could say cunt

knew it was good

When Klein read this poem at the Newton reading mentioned above, the atmosphere was electric, even after she had “warned” the audience that the word, often associated with gutter vulgarity, was part of her vocabulary of self discovery. It further signifies the long journey of the coming of age, remembered as thoroughly intimate, not only in this poem but in many of the poems. Furthermore, it points to the feminist heritage she draws on in the liberation of her language that accompanies her maturity, in her 80 plus years.

As well as moving into published poetry, Karen Klein is also known as a dancer and artist around Boston, and her poems reference works of art, such as visual arts, other writers and my favorite, music.

“Hearing the Borromeo Quartet Play Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang,” attempts to take the rhapsodic power on Beethoven’s sonic genius to the poem. Klein gives the music its character, and by the third section the music is palpable:

III. Finally, the melodic phase.

This time the first violin—its timbre firm,

Beethoven after his near-fatal illness,

the composition a product of recovery.

But this is no “holy song of thanks.”

The certitude he brought back

becomes an urgent plea

that when the Dark Angel closes in,

his wings will obliterate fear,

his embrace be compassionate.

Can you hear it? It’s a plea to listen closely, to hear the wings of death while acknowledging the power of the words to sweep up the listener/reader. As a poem it illustrates the many examples Klein offers in this collection, to make sense of life through creativity, as well as the inevitability of death through art.

Old age is a difficult concept, generally disrespected in society today, where young entrepreneurs are presented by the media as god-like figures. In contrast, these poems indicate the power of remembering life in poetry, circulating to humanize readers, reminding us of our shared humanity, even with all of our diverse personal experiences, while they further remind us of the profoundity of the privilege of experience discovered among the survivors. The poems “Tribal Tongues,” “Raspberry Patch,” and “Shower,” serve as humbling reminders of Klein’s Jewish heritage and that not everyone of her family got out from under the antisemitic death heal of fascists in Europe. No wonder, they “weigh heavy,” as Hilary Mantel said, because the challenges of wisely reflecting on life, relationships, art, love, and survival, are not lightweight matters.

One final comment about the writing history that informs this collection. Klein includes several pages at the conclusion of the book to thank the people in a variety of creative communities, who supported her development as a poet. It is a generous and welcome gesture, as well as a reminder that we are not alone, that poets are poets because they are fundamentally drawn to communicate with other humans using this ancient form. As Karen Klein shows in this wonderful first collection, remembering our collective lives depends on each other.

Doug Holder's Poem "Oh, Don't, She Said," put to Dance and Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdFORxjiK7s&feature=youtu.be

A wonderful rendition of Holder's poem about his 93 year old mother, " Oh, Don't, She said..." performed by the textmoves dance collaborative ( Founded by Karen Klein) music by Jennifer Matthews--this was part of the Third Life Choreography Series that was presented in the South End of Boston ( Urbanity Central Studio) in Dec. 2019. The dance has been performed in other venues around Boston.