A Voice for My Grandmother
by Ron Singer
ISBN 978-0-934830-72-0

Review by Laurel Johnson

24 page chapbook at $12
A Bardpress Chapbook / Ten Penny Players, Inc.
393 St. Pauls Ave.
Staten Island NY 10304
www.tenpennyplayers.org

Ron Singer is a literary renaissance man: writer of poetry and prose, essays and satires; creator of librettos. His work has been featured in journals and e-zines too numerous to mention here. This second edition of A Voice for My Grandmother is a tender, humorous, poignant homage to his Russian-Jewish immigrant grandmother. Could his old country grandma read? Singer isn’t certain about that. Why didn’t she talk more? Perhaps the English language baffled her. It’s clear in Singer’s retrospective that this family matriarch had grit, wisdom, and culinary skills beyond the ordinary.

“Two Wicked Sons-in-Law” is a tongue-in-cheek memory of two men who resented their part in having to house or support their mother-in-law and made jokes about her – until she began meal preparation:

“When they thought it was time for Grandma to leave, both my father and uncle would make jocular, throat-clearing noises, then drop rude, obvious hints. My uncle even did this in front of me once. Har har! The latitude of these scenes was about two degrees south of a sit-com. The boorish sons-in-law did, however, like Grandma's cooking. Is there no one to forgive these men?”

“Ranu, M’zooka” is a delightful story gleaned from Singer’s childhood memories. In it, Grandma’s Russian pronunciations of his name – Ranu instead of Ronald – and her favorite bubble gum are priceless. This story says much in few words about the woman and his relationship with her:

“Ranu, M’zooka,” she would say, as she came through the door.

She would rummage through her huge, patent-leather pocketbook and bring out a very large packet of bubble gum: Bazooka, a segmented log, pink and speckled with sugar. One by one, I would stuff as many segments as I could into my mouth – four? five? – and when the bubble gum broke, it would cover my whole face.

“Ranu!” she would laugh, trying to look strict.

I enjoyed this small chapbook of memories. Ron Singer’s vibrant, personable grandma came to life as did her children and husband, the failed chicken farmer who transformed their world by marketing eggs. Singer’s writing style is appealing, his memories shared with loving humor. My only complaint is that the book isn’t longer. I wanted to know more about Singer’s family, for which he is the last “surviving earthly accountant.” To learn more about this exceptional writer, go to www.ronsinger.net.

Awaiting the Green Morning
By Maria Rosa Lojo
Translated by Brett Alan Sanders
ISBN 978-0-924047-52-7

Review by Laurel Johnson

115 pages at 12.00 soft cover
Host Publications, Inc.
1000 East 7th Suite 201
Austin TX 78702

Though commissioned for New Works Review, this review has previously appeared in the March issue of Midwest Book Review.

Maria Rosa Lojo is an internationally recognized poet, writer, professor, and literary researcher. Brett Alan Sanders is an award-winning writer, translator, essayist, editor, and teacher. Their collaboration here has produced a book of timeless, luminous beauty. Awaiting the Green Morning is a feast for eye, mind, and spirit. Sanders’s helpful introduction explains the who, what, why, where, and how of his collaboration with Ms. Lojo on this book written in four sections. Their credentials are impressive but pale in comparison to the work presented here.

Section One is “Vampires, Dragons, and Other Metamorphoses.” This section reflects truths winnowed from sorrows and hardships – life’s very real monsters. Consider, for example, the prose poem “Steadfast Love”:

I know that your hand will emerge from beneath the earth to sustain me – it will resemble a root, with knots impervious to deterioration. I know that your hand will curl up and hollow itself out to give me rest. I know that it will close and lift itself up, so that I may stand against the fear of the sky. I know that the nights will polish it like a mirror where my life is reflected, so that I may see myself in dreams.
I know that your ashen hand will make sense and will beat like your heart, steadfast nine months to grow me.

I know that it will draw shelter’s last circle and that it will lay me down in the center of that fiery ring.
And all the wind falling in the dark will not be enough to undo it.

Section Two, “Domesticities,” recalls the heartbeat of a home and a past haunted by the beloved voices of ancestors, as in “Weavings”:

The morning builds itself with color. A speck of macerated dust in the bowl of light is with its small torch illuminating the rooms of the house.
But the woman in the doorway has begun a weaving in the reverse of day. She weaves the voice of her dead father and the silent shadow of those who have not been born; she weaves her own name as it was pronounced before Time, weaves the land where morning will sleep, the rose of night that razes the colors in its dark advent.

Section Three, “Journeys,” transcends time and space. “Nomads” brings past, present, and future together through a dreamlike panorama:

The plain is inscribed like a breath on the back of all your dreams.
One night you will dream about carpeted rooms and firm armchairs that cut through the air of those fleeing. Another night you will return to the stone house at the edge of the mountain where the unmoving ancestresses witnessed the flaming passions and terrors. Or you will attend to the words a teacher dictates and copy them endlessly into a notebook like all beginners who have not mastered the art of penmanship. But with one ear in rebellion you will listen to the rumor of nomad women who are traversing the plain.
Then you will be the one expelled from all certain knowing; never now will you learn the calligraphic signs and only with the tread of animal feet will you record on the earth your imperceptible history.

Section Four, “Mother Song,” is a testament to a motherland, a mother tongue, a mother who takes many forms. This excerpt from “Awaiting the Green Morning” is a paean to this literal and figurative birthright:

They await the old day, the day that has already passed, the day of the festival, the one that was when the mornings were so green that they could not bite into them and burned their tongue with an acid scent, when nothing was finished, when everything returned like the tenacious loves in dreams.
They wait seated at the door of their tomb: a tiny house of mud with an armchair to sleep in for centuries on end, listening to the alleluia of the voices that sing to a haughty and foreign God.
No, those voices are not the ones they heard in the torrents of morning: gods of an instant, shining within drops like the joys of dawn, little broken gods in the voice of a girl child that distributed the echoes of bells, delicate spirits like flower heads that women healers crushed in their furtive bowls.

Each word here is chosen for stunning effect. I can’t do such words justice in a review. Awaiting the Green Morning must be savored, absorbed into the marrow, and celebrated. This is an exceptional book and highly recommended.

Confessions: Selected and Edited
By Lynn Clague
ISBN 978-0 97953133-0

Review by Laurel Johnson

41 pages at $10 paperback
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville MA 02143

Clague’s Confessions is a delicious six-course feast. As a poet, he’s approachable; readers can relate to Clague and the life experience he shares. As a man, he’s vulnerable, humorous, and self-effacing. As a reader and reviewer who enjoys poetry, I found the combination of humor and vulnerability to be delightful.

Clague admits in the introduction to being “distant, cool, thinkerish” at times, but in the section titled “Love” he shares this telling self-description:

My most endearing quality is sincerity.
I am tender as a baby’s bottom,
lyrical as a loon.

This excerpt from “Growing Up” describes a typical extended happy hour at home. In this section, Clague details life with his parents and their quest for gracious living, their careers and foibles, and hints at the facades we create in order to survive:

Occasional contretemps
(pardon my French)
drifted into the post-hour hours
if maybe Dad had one too many
or Mom, tacking like a schooner
in a gale, nagged him ragged,
but the disaster behind the façade
occurred only decades later.

In the early years of his “Career” he becomes the master of camouflaged compromise and games of pretend. Such games drained him, but he played them nonetheless:

As the years accumulated
and the paths to profits proliferated,
I tempered my grin
like a blade of steel
into measured smiles.

He has taken harsh tolls from a lifetime of pretense and denial. In “Recovery” comes the sudden insight that changes his life:

Unstruck by lightning,
unvisited by a vision of a burning bush,
I had been changed.

Clague and his Confessions deserve high praise. I cannot do justice to this fine book and Clague’s skill with words in a few excerpts. His poetry must be savored, read and reread, celebrated. This book is highly recommended.

Easy Innocence
By Libby Fischer Hellmann
ISBN 978-1-932557-66-4

Review by Laurel Johnson

396 pages at 14.95 paperback
Bleak House Books
Division of Big Earth Publishing
923 Williamson Street
Madison WI  53703

The creator of the award-winning Ellie Foreman mysteries is back. To quote the author, “This is a departure for me.” Yes, Easy Innocence is darker, the new protagonist harder, and features a disturbing scenario. But readers will recognize Hellmann’s style, including exciting plot development and a strong heroine.

Teenager Sara Long is blonde, beautiful, and intelligent. She’s discovered a better way of making the money needed to buy designer clothes, shoes, purses, and the high-tech toys craved by her high-school peers. Sara’s new line of work does not involve working in fast food restaurants or coffee shops for minimum wage. Her job and the money it produces have become an addictive obsession, one that leads to a violent death. When mentally disturbed Cameron Jordan is found holding the murder weapon next to Sara’s body, the wheels of justice grind swiftly. Murder is uncommon on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore. Jordan is railroaded through the courts without further investigation. Proof against him is what the D.A. calls a “slam dunk.” Only Jordan’s devoted sister and one suspicious cop doubt his guilt. The cop suggests hiring Private Investigator Georgia Davis to search for clues Chicago P.D. might have overlooked in their haste to convict Cameron Jordan.

Not that long ago, Davis was a cop herself. She chafes over being booted off the force but handles the investigation in her typical professional style, as if she were still a cop. Each lead takes her deeper into a world she finds hard to accept, where money buys everything from sex, to favors in high places, to murder. Davis is determined to find the truth, even when clues lead to teenage prostitution and ruthless men who don’t mind killing anyone threatening their power. Complicating her investigation is the sympathy this hard-nosed P.I. feels for the teenage friends of Sara Long.