Poetica Magazine

Ricky Rapoport Friesem
Book Review Editor

We review books of poetry by our published authors.
Please contact us before submitting.

poeticamag@aol.com

April 2009
Review by Ricky Rapoport Friesem

Title: "A Dreamer's Guide to Cities and Streams"
Poems by Joan Gelfand
San Francisco Bay Press (2009)

Expect the unexpected. In her latest collection of poetry, A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, Joan Gelfand stuns the reader with her range of forms and styles. Whether Haiku, or Villanelle, lyric or rap, rhymed or narrative, the poems in this collection are suffused with her marvelous visual acuity, her ear for today’s language, her keen observations of the here and now.

A songwriter, producer, essayist and community organizer, Joan Gelfand is also the recipient of the Chaffin Fiction Award in 2005 for “Paris Blues Redux”. Joan’s story, “The Art Critic” was shortlisted for the Carver Prize. Her work has been published on the web and in numerous literary magazines around the world, including The New York Times Magazine, Poet’s & Writers and Vanity Fair and in a variety of anthologies. She currently serves as President of the Women’s National Book Association and also as judge of Poetica Magazine’s Annual Chapbook Competition.

A review of her 2006 collection entitled, “Seeking Center”, described her work thus: “That these edgy poems avoid sentimentality is a testimony not only to Ms. Gelfand’s metronomic irregularity - her insistence that meaning is primary - but to the sharp, jagged, always intelligent quality of her awareness.” This apt description holds true of her newest collection as well .Just when you think you have her pigeonholed, she confronts you with the unexpected: words laid bare as she  drops the definite article, interrupts a line with slashes, or shifts moods from playful (another one of her talents) to profound.

Gelfand’s affinity with nature is matched by her anger and regret of how we treat our planet: In Requiem for a Dying World, she writes:

 “The taste for cash replaces
The taste for something gorgeous”

In Golden Gate, she begins with a lyric description of the landscape:

“Knife edged hills laid leisurely, deceiving”, surprises us with “But for me, the languorous red swipe taunts,” and leaves us with the haunting,
“Sometimes, distance is greater than the space
Between two points.”

A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams is an outstandingly rich, multilayered collection that rewards the reader with new meanings and nuances at every reading. And you will want to read these poems again and again.

September 2008
Review by Ricky Rapoport Friesem

Title: "Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths"
Poems by Judy Kronenfeld
The Lichfield Review Press 2008

You don’t have to be Jewish, or middle-aged, or a woman, or a first generation American, or from the Bronx to be blown away by the power and insight of Judy Kronenfeld’s poetry. But if you are any or all of the former, you will be astounded at her ability to probe your very essence in this outstanding collection, which is the winner of the Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize for 2007

Judy Kronenfeld was born in New York and educated at Smith College and Stanford University where she received a Ph.D in English. She has taught English Literature at UC Riverside, UC Irvine, and Purdue University since 1984, and has been teaching in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. Her criticisms, reviews, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the author of a previous full-length collection and two chapbooks of poetry.

Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths is an amazing expression of the poet’s love for her immigrant parents to whom this volume is dedicated. And much, much more. Kronenfeld has that rare ability to create indelible images that strike a responsive chord. In the poem, Unravelings, she describes the experience of clearing out her parents home, and settling a parent into a nursing home, where …"the widows and widowers, weary after our hour’s visit, sleep in their new small rooms, curled around the shape of silence, forgetting at the speed of light." In the poem, The Withering of Their State she is able, in just a few words, to express the essence of the poignant relationship between the once powerful parent figure and the now empowered offspring: "…they allow themselves to be removed, guided by the pliant elbows of those who still live in the bordered world."

With her keen eye for detail, Kronenfeld transforms everyday objects and experiences into sharp triggers of memories and emotions: "My mother’s pots came from Woolworth’s or Kresge’s, aluminum with tiny metal handles to burn my hands on, bottoms dimpled as a baby’s, round as rub-a-dub-dub, and scrubbed for fifty years." It says it all—the way we once were, the way we once lived.

In a moment of sheer happiness in Bonzo Wonders, Kronenfeld writes: " This aimless world’s not a blip in the mind of the all sufficient One - but the wild overflow of his hugely abundant, self-observing love, spangling eternity’s white boredom."

Kronenfeld could have been describing her brilliant poetry.

June 2008

Book Review by Ricky Rapoport Friesem

Title: The Vast Unknowing

by Nancy Shiffrin

Worldwide Association of Writers (WWAOW)

Alpharetta, Georgia,USA

Buckle up. Hold tight! Reading The Vast Unknowning is like riding the rollercoaster. It will plunge you into despair, exhilarate you, shake you to the depths of your being, terrify you, elate, disturb. And leave you weak kneed, dizzy, and delighted that you saw it through to a safe landing. A ride not to be missed.

Dr. Nancy Shiffrin earned her MA studying with the renowned author and diarist, Anais Nin. She earned her Ph.D at the Union Institute, studying Jewish-American Literature. Her work has won awards and honorable mentions from the Academy of American Poets, the Alice Jackson Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Prizes and the Dora Teitelbaum Foundation. In addition to her extensive writings which have appeared in numerous periodicals, she also runs Creative Writing Services, a literary arts consultancy for coaching aspiring writers.

In Song, the evocative, lyric poem which opens this 143 page book, Shiffrin avers: “I cannot release the song lodged in my throat.” But then she does just that. Her poems spit words in a staccato shorthand. For example, in Cindy’s Twig, a grim, contemporary take on the Cinderella tale, she writes: “…full moon sneering in window star-freckled sky”. Words as weapons, words as balm, sometimes words that puzzle, words that arouse. In her poem, Special Relativity, she writes: “… I hate stories of lost women calloused hands head stuck in ovens .I’d rather describe mornings on the highway ochre hills mauve peaks aroma of grape and anise” But she does both, conjuring up a gallery of women with a fierce, often painful, cynicism on the one hand and evoking lyric, soaring  images of nature on the other. Only in the section entitled “ My Jewish Education” does her brilliant incisiveness sometimes falter and create Woody Allen-like stereotypes. But perhaps this too was intentional.  

In her poem, At the Writer’s Retreat, Shiffrin quotes Anais Nin: "There are no writers’ blocks, only secrets we are afraid of telling." Nancy Shiffrin isn’t afraid. And no one will remain indifferent to the virtuoso power with which she reveals her secrets.

May 2008

Book Review by Ricky Rapoport Friesem