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Open Books: Event Archive
November 01, 2007 07:30 PM
MOLLY TENENBAUM
Ms. Tenenbaum's new collection, Now ($16 Bear Star), reads something
like a private tour of the museum of alternative lives. These are not heroic
lives, "I Work at the Wonderbread Factory" for example, but they are made
magical by her highly musical and descriptive language. She approaches her
subjects with a mixture of gusto and wistfulness. The imagery and insights
are constantly surprising, as when, in the poem "We Used to Run Old World
Fudge," she calls stirring the fudge "our private pastoral." The music is so
front-and-center in a few of the pieces that they read like children's
poetry. But the adult's emotional complexity is never left out -- "under the
grate the murmur / under the mirror the stalk / under the talk the lure /
under the hurry the up." The often funny and often aching poetry in Now
ends up describing the poet through contrast to her unlived lives. She
becomes an image seen clearly in relief.
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