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books you might have missed!
WINTER BOOK PICKS
Necessary Myths by Grant Clauser
“So what if Romulus/put down the stone/and embraced his brother?/ Would our paths be/so different than now?” So goes a passage of the title poem of Grant Clauser’s eloquent but often, and perhaps understandably so, pessimistic book of poetry, Necessary Myths (Broadkill Press, 2013). In the aforementioned stanza, Clauser seems to be asking whether mythology, or any similar artifice created by the gods or man could assuage the grim fate that may now be facing the world in this the early years of the 21st century. Necessary Myths, which is the winner of the prestigious 2013 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, makes an elaborate, and very articulate, case for falleness, loss, entropy, and, yes, perhaps even doom of a kind.
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Clauser is a master of wordcraft. There is a kind of late afternoon buzz quality to his descriptions of nature — even in its impermanence. I can definitely see the sun setting on so much of what he describes where we can find such things as “a gossiping spring between rocks...” (“The Children Discover a Spring Between Rocks”). And also perhaps, ever so vaguely, there is a yearning for a terribly remote and tenuous unfallen past. A garden that was probably already beginning to petrify moments after its creation. — Peter Baroth
The Bright Field of Everything
nounced but understated; her artistry is similarly visible without being ostentatious. Each poem is an axis mundi linking earthly, animal physicality to the magical, spiritual, or cerebral. A reader may need a medical dictionary to understand some of the language in the poems, but such attention is rewarded by Deborah Fries’ expansive, but piercing voice. — Courtney Bambrick
by Deborah Fries
Deborah Fries’ poem “Marie in America” was selected by Dorothea Lasky as Philadelphia Stories’ 2013 winner of the Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry. Reading the poem again — it is the first poem in the collection — I am struck by the elegant coexistence of science and humanity it presents. The human body here, that of Marie Curie, is ultimately vulnerable to radiation — and so many other “invasive” elements. Fries catalogs bones, legs, skin, marrow in the first few lines of the poem, but almost immediately points to their weakness.
Throughout the collection, Fries considers the human body in medical and mythical terms. It is a home from which one might be uprooted or transplanted. Poems such as “Man with a Hat” or “Balls” explore the animal aspects of our human bodies — how our bodies (and the bodies of others) delight, deceive, and disappoint. The poems in the section “Sketching the Invasives” suggest the impermanence of geographical homes. Overall, the collection balances the cerebral and the corporeal, examining the author’s experience through scientific and spiritual lenses. The scope of Deborah Fries poetry here is massive — her focus finds specks of dust in the universe and the universe in a speck of dust. Her humor is pro-
The Blessings by Elise Juska
Realistic yet intimate at the same time, Elise Juska takes readers to the heart of Philadelphia in The Blessings and peoples it with a family readers will come to know as if they were our own. We are immediately drawn into the large, extended Blessing family, and the separate, but united lives that they live.
Juska brings alive the characters, both individually and as a family unit. The book begins with the story of Abby Blessing, just starting college in the 1990s, where “…she has begun to perceive her own uniqueness, to recognize her family as something apart from other families, with its own rhythm and code.” The book then quickly moves into the deep emotional territory of the shaping of the Blessing family and the moments of their lives in the city.
The Blessings is the kind of book that will make readers stop and think, in a good way. For example, near the end of the book, we are introduced to Elena,
