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Open Books: Events
May 05, 2009 07:30 PM
IDRA NOVEY & CAREY SALERNO
Idra Novey’s The Next Country ($14.95 Alice James) features an intelligent lyricism -- “what place after this much history isn’t pinned to the ground with gravestones” -- with a focus on foreignness, both through international travel and within the family. Her descriptions are rich and touching -- “a mother becomes parchment / and rolls up gradually around the fictions / of her children.” Marie Ponsot calls these poems “bold, immediate, uninhibited by fashions, …very American originals.”
The poetry in Carey Salerno’s Shelter ($14.95 Alice James) is hard-edged and hard-earned, reflecting a young woman’s time working in an animal shelter. “Nothing born inside our shelter ever lived -- / parvo, distemper, euthanasia, stillbirth. Even us.” Told in a plain style, the experiences here show the bleak side of American pet ownership. The shelter staff’s ineptitude and displaced anger, and the bureaucracy’s malfeasance, become troubling, sad poems for reader and writer. From the poem titled “Euthanasia (E-Room)” -- “the e-room speeds to bury me, my name // summoned over the PA.”
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