Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang/ Hub Theatre Company of Boston

Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang

Hub Theatre Company of Boston

Directed by Margaret Ann Brady

http://www.hubtheatreboston.org/

Review by Doug Holder

Have you ever had a significant encounter with someone at Market Basket-- in-- say, the frozen food section? I can't say that I have...but while fondling a yam—I had an idea for a poem, but I digress. In playwright Christopher Durang's play “ Laughing Wild,”presented by the Hub Theatre Company of Boston, at the Club Cafe in the South End of the city, something significant happens between two conflicted characters in the tuna fish aisle at Gristede's in New York City. The play ( set in the 1980s)  directed by former Somerville resident Margaret Ann Brady, uses this encounter between an unnamed man and woman as a conduit for an exploration of ontological questions like: why can't I find love? a job? meaningful work? spiritual fulfillment? etc... 

Lauren Elias who plays the unstable woman (the character has had several stints at the state mental hospital) assaults a neurotic male New Yorker as he ponders the existential question: “ What brand of tuna should I buy?” Elias has a set of pipes like Ethel Merman, and the comic flair of the manic Toti Fields. Her eyes are wide-open pools of angst, and fear-- as if some spectral presence revealed itself to her. I also focused on her mouth, a wide, nattering orifice, that chattered incessantly, as if we were viewing a Beckett play. There was a yin/yang thing going on in her performance-- a raging Prince Hamlet throwing barbs at a hypocritical society, the thinning of the ozone layer, Ronald Reagan, even Mother Teresa and her dreadful love of children. On the other side is a women seeking connection, and realizes her search for the silver lining is lost in the dark cloud banks.

Robert Orzalli, the object of the woman's attention, has a wonderful doughy and rubbery face, and shock of Harpo Marx curly hair, all of which help convey his zany embrace of New Age philosophy and the obligatory platitudes—while at the same time letting out burst of contempt about the search for beauty, relationships, a meaningless job, his life as a Gay man, and the list goes on.

Brady, who told me she once lived on Ibbetson Street in Somerville ( Where my Ibbetson Street Press was founded), and was part of the Mrs. Potato Head comedy/musical troupe with my next door neighbor on School St., Berklee professor Lucy Holstedt, has long been a fan of Durang—a master of satire, dark comedy, and all kinds of absurd drama. This is evident in the energy the players bring to the stage, and the audience “laughing wild” in their seats.

Interview with Heather Aveson: New News Director of Somerville Community Access TV

Interview with Heather Aveson: New News Director of Somerville Community Access TV

By Doug Holder

Heather Aveson joined me at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square to talk about her new role as the News Director of Somerville Community Access TV's program,  Somerville Neighborhood News. Aveson is an energetic woman with an infectious smile, and is as accessible as any of the staff at the station, who I have worked with over the years. From my chat with her I came away with the distinct impression that she abhors the obvious story, and always digs deep into its soft underbelly.

Aveson is no stranger to Somerville. She has lived on Willow Ave., and bought her first house on Lowell St. with her husband, before defecting to the 'burbs. I asked Aveson what she thought about the gentrification of Somerville.  As chance will have it she told me she was working on a story about this very subject. She has already learned that much of the investment in real estate in our community is coming from Russian and Chinese interests.She said, “I am asking, 'Where are we going from here?' I wonder if people who are born and raised in Somerville will be able to continue to live here. I am afraid Somerville may be on the road to becoming a sterile environment -- like say Kendall Square in Cambridge.”

Aveson took over the directorship of Somerville Neighborhood News when the founding director Jane Regan moved on to new horizons. Aveson was a former news producer at WGBH on the 10:00 News with Christopher Lydon. She told me," Chris set the bar very high. He always encouraged me to dig deep.”

Aveson reflected, “ I want to continue Jane's mission of giving a voice to people who don't have a voice.” And some of these people she gave a voice to were the Nepalese community in our city, as well as the janitors at Tufts University who were being laid off, etc... Aveson said he wants to report on stories that are interesting, controversial, and important to the community.

Although SCAT has a a lot of new innovations and cutting-edge technology, it of course can't compare to WGBH where Aveson once worked. Aveson opined, “ Telling a story, is telling a story. It is what you bring into it. I want to be a hands on person with a close relationship with the community.”

When I asked Aveson to talk about her time with Lydon on WGBH her eyes' lit up. She said “ Chris brought a curiosity and passion to his work. We did a diverse group of stories from a local piano builder in Woburn,  to a piece on  Stan Grossfield' (The Boston Globe) war photography concerning the Beirut conflict, and other fascinating stories.”

Aveson told me she also works as a programming coordinator for Wilson Farms in Lexington. She created the famed “ Spooky Hayride” event that has run for the past ten years. She is a strong advocate of urban farming—creating plots to grow veggies amidst the hot asphalt of the city.

Aveson tries to instill in her staff and interns the need to research a story—and to have a sense of history. For instance, instead of  simply writing a story that a new business opening in Somerville, the reporter should ask questions like, "Why did they chose a place to do business where things can change drastically in just a few years, etc... Aveson said, “ You have to be open to the fact that a story unfolds one way,  but it may go in a totally different direction. You have to be flexible"'

.

I am looking forward to the ongoing changes Aveson will bring---  here... in the Paris of New England.

The Underwater Typewriter By Marc Zegans

Poet Marc Zegans

The Underwater Typewriter
By Marc Zegans
Pelekinesis Press

Review by Meghan Guidry

Charting the Depths – A Review of Marc Zegans’ The Underwater Typewriter

Poets who are capable of fearlessly engaging with the sting of absence are rare, and in his new collection The Underwater Typewriter, Marc Zegans’ has proven that he is in that select few. The collection is visually lush and carefully crafted, the mark of a poet who is deeply attuned to the undercurrents of the world as it is both experienced and imagined.

Stylistically, Zegans draws from the American Beat Poets and British Romanticism to shape an immersive poetic landscape simultaneously luminous and lonely. He is fearless with language, weaving luxurious description into every line of text—yet Zegans knows that compelling poetry needs more than description alone. What makes The Underwater Typewriter truly alluring is the poet’s clear vision and interlocking themes.

Human engagement and connection is a negative condition of survival in Zegans’ poetic environment. Without it, we perish. This is the axiom of Zegans’ work: The whiplash anxiety between grasping for connection and the moments of grace when it’s obtained.

Zegans’ speakers’ voices are at once wise and terrified, the latter because of the former. Understanding the importance of skin, of smile, of safe silence between self and other, Zegans’ poetic avatars turn the world for authenticity, and for meaningful connections to place, to time, and most importantly, to people.

Absence and distance are tangible beings in Zegans’ work. These are no less important, and no less real, than the speakers themselves. They are the tactile gulfs separating us from each other, whether by circumstance or design. Zegans both maps and mitigates these gulfs, charting the places where two souls press against the shared distance between them.

    Imagine two perfect absences
    separated by interval
    un-reckoned by the cycles of light.

                                                                   (from" The Reunion of Darkness")

Zegans charts these distances not through measurement, but by artifact, by what he pulls from the depths of the spaces between us, executed expertly in poems such as “Salvage” and “Hacking”

        Yet we haul and fondle worn bits, gauging
        texture and mass, function and fit, and loss
        holes and breakage, sometimes signifying.

                        (from “Salvage”)

        Air rises between me
        and the coat, stained
        orange. What does
        it say about me
        that I wear this pen
        splotched relic
        out and about?

                        (from “Hacking”)

Zegans doesn’t dwell where life dramatically ruptures; instead he rests at the jarring moments when, in the ordinariness of our everyday habits, we are suddenly and inextricably reminded of the abyss lurking just beyond the mundane.

Zegans also brings illusion to the forefront as an incarnation of the fantastic and as a condition of human existence. If illusions of self and meaning separate us from each other, then this poet strives for an inroad that is tangible and sacred in the overwhelming weight of our multitudes of masks.

    As if every part must be a sign post

    A ballyhoo for that which isn’t there
    She’d come quieter, drawing my hand

(from “drawing”)

Zegans is at his best when he, as Helene Cixous wrote, “writes by the light of the axe.” His language is vivid, colorful, and sensory, but it is the moments he speaks unadorned that truly sing, the moments in which he bravely confronts the reader and dares us to know him:

    I cannot raise the strength
    to summon the day dream
    that allowed me know
    the world without border

(from “perchance”)

The Underwater Typewriter isn’t merely a collection of poems. It is an assembly of artifacts dragged from the depths of human relationship and heart, laid bare to turn, to witness, and ultimately, to love.

The Underwater Typewriter is published by Pelekinesis Press, and is available for pre-order here: http://pelekinesis.com/catalog/marc_zegans-the_underwater_typewriter.html

Furs Not Mine By Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen

Furs Not Mine

By Andrea Cohen

Four Way Books

New York, NY

ISBN: 978-1-935536-51-2

89 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Poems as polished as those by Andrea Cohen give up their secrets very slowly. Furs Not Mine, Cohen’s newest collection encourages her readers to enter its confines with enameled logic and diamond-edged imagery. Once inside one finds a sense of loss, a Siberian coldness, and a ghostly hunger for a way out. Escape, however, may not be in the cards. The chilliness continues even after the book’s completion and Cohen’s well-wrought lines ebb away into mnemonic limbo.

The opening poem, a really marvelous short piece entitled The Committee Weighs In sets the tone. Give and take repartee between mother and daughter exudes warmth, family closeness, and intellectual life. Then, of course, clarity enters with its uncomfortable surprises. The poet’s persona has just jokingly announced her reception of the Nobel Prize to her mother who engages playfully. The poem continues,

Again? she says. Which

discipline this time?

It’s a little game

we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she

pretends she isn’t dead.

Notice that the startling last line all but swallows up the self-deprecating humor prefacing it. Nice touch.

Breaking and Entering, a poem of profound pessimism, leaves one locked in a world of night where homes devolve into lonely interiors. Cohen’s wit takes control here, saving the day and keeping the piece emotionally taut. Here’s the heart of the poem,

Mostly the home

invasion is an inside

job: your interiors

get ravaged and pointing

a finger, you

mean to seek

damages. I left

the window open,

told the guard

dogs to roll over.

He pinched my last

Candlestick…

Cohen’s poem Macaroons quips about the penultimate things of life, as well as the acceptance of death. Her tone is clipped. The phrase “I get it” takes on a sullen choral power not directed at her dead mother, but rather at the deal humanity gets as one by one they make their way through the brutish and duplicitous aspects of life. The poet especially pummels the concept of the Promised Land. Navigating the short lines and tight logic I felt breathless, caught in the poem, unable to slip out between the syllables. From the very first line the tone of the piece never varies. Cohen opens her strange lament with acceptance, aggressive acceptance,

I get it now

You’re dead.

You can’t do

everything

you used to.

Reruns instead

of new episodes.

I get it.

You can’t send

Macaroons this Passover…

My favorite poem in this collection Cohen entitles Bargain. The poet relates a story line as old as human kind. Well-heeled travelers are led into the desert, perhaps for quixotic reasons (Magi? tourists?). Their guide wants to renegotiate the terms of their agreement now that he has the upper hand. In the desert no deal is iron-clad. Everything can be renegotiated when circumstances change. The irony of their situation strikes a chord due to the self-satisfied arrogance that led the travelers into this trap of their own making. In fact I know a little bit about this type of negotiation, only it happened to me at 12,000 feet in the Hind Kush Mountains. My guides, who otherwise were quite honest, saw an opportunity to exercise their business acumen. We compromised. Back to the review at hand. Cohen ends this poem with a grounding eye-opening flip. She uses this technique in many of her pieces and she does it well. Actually, she does it better than anyone I can think of. The poet details a changing reality,

Such slim wages

to take us, without

complaint, all the way—

so far, without a star.

We were in the middle

of nowhere, or at its edge.

Friends, he asked, from

inside that blackness,

what will you pay me

to take you back?

The word “Friends” in this context deserves special mention for its remarkable and almost instantaneous transformation into a sinister threat par excellence, infused with surrounding darkness in case one misses the point.

Furs Not Mine, the title poem, seems almost etched onto the page. Each line exposing angular depth as it builds into the singular metaphor. The poet’s spiritual iciness speaks for itself. Consider these telling lines,

…one

need not be or speak Russian

to comprehend the sense

of furs not mine. One need only

to have known deep cold, an inmost

Siberia made more Siberian by one

who basks nearby, oblivious in her Bolivia.

Like an unindicted co-conspirator he lords over us, this God of ours, the God of Job, with arched right eye and then judges us for what we do and don’t do. Yes, we created this God not only to share our guilt, but also to commiserate with us over his so-called gift of free will. Yeah, thanks a bunch. Cohen puts it another way in her riveting poem entitled Sins of Omission. Her protagonist, stricken with regret over life choices and lost potential, tests the very reality of her dream-world and calmly arrives at its dead end. Her family dissolves as she steps back in existential dread,

…God knows

we’ve been left

out by God.

The last part I

say under my breath

so my son

won’t hear. But—

little pitchers—he

does. Mom, he

says his brow knit.

It’s the moment

I’ve dreaded. You

know I don’t

really exist, right?

Poems that confront the glacial landscapes deeply within our shared consciousness are few and far between. Cohen’s icy architectures in this stellar collection showcase her uncommon bravery in facing humanity’s common, but no less scary, demons. Engagement generates warmth. That’s one of the poet’s secrets. Now breathe.

Nina R. Alonso: A Poet with a dancer’s sensibility.

Nina R. Alonso (Left) Kathleen Spivack ( Right)

Nina Alonso is a poet, who also happens to own the Fresh Pond Ballet in Cambridge. To her poetry and dance are in step, and she brings her poet’s sensibility to her young charges at her school. Alonso’s poetry has appeared in the Southern Women’s Review, The New Boston Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares and many other publications.  The renowned David Godine Press published her book “The Body.” She is also the founder of the literary magazine Constellations. I had the privilege to interview her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You have an unusual name Nina Rubenstein Alonso.

Nina R. Alonso:  My background is Jewish, Russian,  and Ukrainian. My grandparents fled Russia and the Ukraine many years ago. I got Alonso from my late husband Fernando. So I keep those two names. They identify me…they mean something.

DH: Reading your poetry I can see that you have an affinity for Spain.

NRA:  My late husband and I spent months traveling there. It was a great privilege to roam around Spain—Morocco, Tangier, Spain…it all made a deep impression on me.

DH; You had a poetry collection “This Body” published by the prestigious press, David Godine, Inc. How was your experience with them?

NRA: It was great working with this press. They were extremely cordial and helpful. It was an early book.

DH: What is the history behind the book?

NRA: I was working with two wonderful writers at Brandies University, where I was studying. They were Howard Nemerov, and Allen Grossman. Both of these writers didn’t try to make you like them. They were respectful that I was not the easiest graduate student. I was an artist first. They helped me. Instead of doing a traditional PhD thesis, I wrote a book of poetry. This was allowed back then. They put me in touch with David Godine and the rest is history.

DH You taught at U/Mass Boston, Brandeis, and you said you were eventually “saturated” with academia…. Explain.

NRA: Maybe it is different now, but it was a very high-pressured environment. At the time I was teaching poetry, short fiction and dancing. I loved to teach, but I didn’t want to write scholarly papers. I didn’t like the politics that is part of any academic community. I wasn’t on the tenure track. I didn’t fit.  I was skipping out of faculty meetings, to go to dance classes and write poetry. It was a tough environment because in the 70s male faculty had very little respect for women in the context of the literary tradition. I wanted to teach a course about women writers, and I was grilled mightily. They finally let me do it but it was with the greatest skepticism a lack of respect. They really didn’t have a formulated idea that there was a tradition of women writers. The core curriculum excluded women except for a few exceptions, Dickinson, Wharton, etc…

DH: How did the Fresh Pond Ballet School come into fruition?

NRA: I taught t Boston Ballet for 11 years. I got that gig after I left U/Mass. Eventually I left there and by chance opened up my school.

DH: Does Ballet inform your poetry?

NRA: At times I write about ballet.  The thing about ballet is you are talking French most of the time but for the most part it is nonverbal. I always wondered why I am so incredibly nonverbal in ballet and so verbal in poetry. They are two things that feel right for me.

DH: In reading your poetry in your collection “Nightingale Notes,” I find your poetry to be stripped down. Do you feel this gives it more power?

NRA:  I am very strict about what I use in my poetry. I don’t like language that is too common. I work a poem until I can’t push it anymore. I don’t use extra word, filler. I see filler in a lot of poetry. Some people are comfortable about using language that is not exactly cliché, but close. It can be done well, or it can be empty.

DH: In a section of your collection “Nightingale Notes,” tilted “Pilgrim Café,” you seem to compare the culture of Spain vs. the Hollywood clichés of the United States.

NRA:  It is more like  that’s the way places are especially in Spain in the 0s You wander around this pilgrimage site, walk the sacred paths; then you go to the café, and a cowboy flick from the states flickers on the TV there. There is no culture that is monolithic.

DH: Tell me about your literary magazine, “Constellations.”

NRA: We are in our fifth issue. I founded it with Jack Miller, a fine poet who does the entire tech work. With the magazine I wanted to create a community that feels authentic to me. I am trying to create some permanence. I look for poetry that has something to say.

Somerville’s Randi Freundlich: A Photographer with an Eye to the Children of the World

Randi Freundlich

Somerville’s Randi Freundlich:  A Photographer with an Eye to the Children of the World

By Doug Holder

    “I would like to live there (in Honduras), but then I wouldn’t—because you don’t see so many stuff that America has. Over there is poor. It’s considered one of the poorest countries.”-- Heibyn

This unedited quote is from a Honduran immigrant child named Heibyn, who is one of the subjects of photographer Randi Freundlich’s project “Children of the World/Boston.” Freundlich is a social worker, who trained as a photographer.  She is currently taking photographs of immigrant children that includes  text from the kids or their parents. Freundlich joined me at my usual table at the Bloc 11 Café in Somerville to talk about “Children of the World…,” her life and work.

Freundlich is a long-time resident of Somerville, residing in our city since 1982. She said of Somerville: “ I love its diversity and aliveness.” Freundlich opined about the rapid gentrification of Somerville, stating,  “Unfortunately many people who were born and raised in Somerville won’t be able to afford to live here. I hope there is going to be an emphasis on affordable housing and economic diversity.”

For years Freundlich has been a social worker working in the field of parenting education. She is retiring soon from her regular gig, but she will be a consultant to other social service agencies.

In her work with immigrant children, she came up with the idea for the project titled “Children of the World/Boston.” She talked a bit about her work with this venture:

I work with immigrant families and their situations are unique. Many immigrant families have no immediate family in the area and have little support. They don’t know the school system and all the decisions that must be made. If they don’t speak English then their problems are compounded. I find the plight of these families with children quite interesting. I have photographed children from 50 different countries, such as:  Ireland, Israel, and Lebanon, to name a few. I hope to have 100 countries eventually. I conduct interviews of families, photograph the children, and take compelling snippets of text from these interviews. The parents of the children receive a high quality 8 by 10 print. The photos will be part of an exhibit and will be part of a book.

Freundlich told me that she trained as a photographer at the Art Institute of Chicago; but she needed a steady income so she went into social work. Freundlich does commercial photography as well, including: Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, etc… She counts Walker Evans, Mary Ellen Mark, Dorothy Lange among the many photography masters who have influenced her work.

In a city of immigrants, it is nice to know we have a dedicated photographer who creates images and text that people will come back to in years to come. And that my friend—is the way it is—in—The Paris of New England.

To find out more about Randi Freundlich and her work go to:  http://www.RandiFreundlichPhotography.com

Until It Does Us In Myles Gordon

Until It Does Us In

Myles Gordon

Cervená Barva Press

ISBN 978-0-9861111-0-5

Myles Gordon begins this chapbook of 24 sonnets with a question, How is it we evolve from violence? This question is prompted by the suicide of his older cousin who was two generations removed from victims of the Holocaust in Poland. The poems are woven like the histories they probe—moving between 2013 and 1937.

We meet the cousin, addressed as ‘you’ throughout the collection, in 1967 as a teenager with “hippie hair” and then again in 1963, when his father is found “sneaking through/your sister’s dresser, underwear in hand” and thrown out of the house; at this turbulent point in the family history, “the good time cousin” is feeding a two-foot bong in the basement. Next, 1975, when the cousin’s father was beaten to death in a bar, Gordon writes: “No matter what you say or what you do/or how potent your stash, he’s with you now. It/plays itself in echoes in your heart,/slowly, methodically tearing you apart.”

Interspersed with these poems about the cousin’s life, are poems set in war-time Poland, in the 1930s and 40s. These poems, removed from the immediacy of the relationship with the cousin, are more evocative and poetic—less narrative-driven. In Sonnet 12, entitled, “1942 – Brona Cora,” the writing is especially powerful:

Shadows stretched: long limbs in morning sun;

a walking forest emerging from the trail

on muddy grass, dew shimmering green and brown,

long shadow bodies, heads providing frail

tree tops on the ground the beards the hats,

the headscarves, little girls’ long flowing hair

a forest canopy captured in shadow that

filled the meadow’s crevices everywhere.

There were so many. Shadows flowed like liquid

until forced into the ditches, ordered to lie

like cordwood. Shot. Blood seeping into mud

beneath a crisp and clear October sky,

the Jews of Brest Litovsk; the German gun.

The shadows dwindled, thinned. Then there were none.

The sonnet form, handled quite deftly by Gordon, lends itself to this difficult subject material, constraining the expression and thus deepening it. Gordon uses these poems to explore possible ways of understanding the despair of his cousin. The narratives in this volume offer up culturally and historically situated portrayals of individuals, while admitting that however much we attempt to understand what motivates human behavior, we are ultimately interdependent mysteries to one another.

Who can say where we begin? “We’ve lifted up our souls/like children picking up the fallen leaves/the wind caught, stuffed them in the shredding holes/inside our tortured bodies.” Where to find the fundamental hurt that turns a life into a soured search for death? Gordon looks to history—personal, familial, and political histories.  He portrays his cousin’s life as a stream made up of many tiny contributories, a stream that cuts a scar through hardened layers of bedrock, exposing the lasting and potent pain of violence.

Reviewer: Mary Buchinger Bodwell, author of Aerialist (Gold Wake, 2015) and Roomful of Sparrows (Finishing Line, 2008), teaches at MCPHS University in Boston, Mass.

House You Cannot Reach: Poems in the Voice of My Mother and other Poems by Tom Daley

Tom Daley

Review of Tom Daley

House You Cannot Reach:

Poems in the Voice of My Mother and other Poems.
FutureCycle Press

Review by Alice Weiss

This is a book of Browningesque dramatic monologues. A character is designated, “My Mother.” A character is designated, son. He is the recorder, the redacter. He gives her voice, and what a voice it is! Here is Mother, an angel bathing her between her legs, addressing her sons:

And that’s where you

you head firsters, blind and slick,

scraped your glossy scalps

and heaven knows why

. . .

With every contraction

in every post-Eden birth,

I salute the smirk

in Eve’s twinge. I bless

her broken water

and her trespassing teeth.

Note the movement from the scrappy comedy of birth and delivery, to the mythical. Revising the story of Eden, defying it and claiming it: Eve’s twinge smirks, and her teeth “trespass” Just that word conjures up another prayer, Don’t bother to forgive our trespasses, this last is the ritual ordinary and then: “we will all one day/ fall—or swim unbounded by any womb,” fall out of the myth into:

. . . a tub’s clean porcelain,

forgetting

to drown or crawl.

Read as a whole, the book is filled with clusters of language that shake up convention, bring comic exaggeration to a disturbingly precise level of linguistic experience.

In a whalebone walkabout

he unties the fire-blight of his smiles—

smiles scored like stone Buddhas, smiles that implode

Snowing rock dust over pastures and shoals.

“Prodigal at Point Reyes”

See how complex the alliteration in whalebone walkabout, the w’s, and b’s, the ‘ l’ in whale, silently echoed by the ‘l’ in walk, but pointing to the compressive activity of the accented, rhythmic ‘walkabout’, and then the contrast in the next line, all long ‘i’s, but reinterpreting the ‘l’s in sound as well as meaning as the smiles betray themselves.

‘

Here’s a hope chest

Where mothballs

Seal the rot in his slapstick.

The hoard the stains where his T-shirts

sweated out Trotskyist proverbs.

Here’s a cruet for his chrism,

a vat for his vinegar.

“My Mother Speaks with Two Police Officers

Who Arrive at Her Door on Good Friday Afternoon”

In this last quote, from a poem referring to the speaker’s brother’s suicide, the Mother enumerates his (metaphoric) possessions, the hoard of stains, the Trotskyite proverbs and the cruet for his chrism,” a small bottle for the anointing oil used in the Mass, and “ the enormous “Vat for his vinegar.” Vinegar stinging scouring wine turned bitter. “Confession,” she holds, “ is a tongue stroked into blare,” in “My Mother’s litany for the Feast Day of Saint Bibiana,” the saint of headaches. In another poem, “After a Stroke, My Mother Listens to a Chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace,” a novel in which she finds cold comfort.:

Frostbite is an indifferent fever,

is a blackhead’s Passion Play,

is a discharge of burning.

It is evident from the beginning of the book even from reading the table of contents that there is an underlying narrative threading through the pages. A Passion Play is a form of drama that tells the story of the death of Jesus. The mother’s is a blackhead’s Passion Play. First Mother and son curled around each other in a comedic and agonizing reflection of the virgin and her son. The father from whose abandonment the mother never recovers, The mother whose sensual memories last as long as her fury at his betrayal. God and the various Saints, whose failure is nowhere more evident than in the inability of the wedding sacrament to hold the man to her, leaving her

a woman sucker-switched

and swatting wide.

After a stroke the mother loosens her language. turns even wilder and yet miraculously projects a reasoned, if jaded a reasoned grasp of the world and its troubles. The final drama for her is her children’s failure to give her descendents. It strands her in time. With these poems, the son, the narrator gets the better of that. She in fact descends like the angel Gabriel blowing a complex heavenly horn..

One more thing. The issue of descendents of the biological replication of the self, reveals itself in the quietly saddest poem:”My Mother Explains Why She Threw Away All My Dolls.” She is the mother, for all their closeness, who cannot but point out that his “dowsing stick [is] bent in the wrongest ways.” She threw away the Raggedy Anns. She was the “Erasing Angel,” she admits, but she cannot budge.

Son, if you cannot speak

to sorrow in the full skin

of a man.

I will not hedge tomorrow

just to lose it in your hands.