Description
Book SynopsisAsks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from our delights and losses? Riding on Kenneth Koch's instruction to "find one true feeling and hang on," this title overtakes the present with candor, meditation, and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force.
Trade ReviewOne of Library Journal's Best Books in Poetry for 2012 "[Greenbaum's] great intelligence, skill with abstraction, humor, and talent for endings raise her poems far above the mundane."--Publishers Weekly "Greenbaum's work, written in the everyday patois of urban Americans, has been characterized as edgy and idiosyncratic, localized and wry, and she's earned comparisons to Whitman and Hart Crane for her lyrical familiarity with the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and environs... Greenbaum's storyteller is not just interesting, but interested, and invested, in the world. Be it a kibbutz outside Tel Aviv, or Texas in the twentieth century, hers is a truly cosmopolitan perspective, refreshing and unique, but now practiced and increasingly refined."--Diego Baez, Booklist "This collection, in Paul Muldoon's series of Princeton Contemporary Poets, arrives trailing clouds of glory... [Jessica Greenbaum] has a clear, precise, authentic and seductive narrative voice."--Keith Richmond, Tribune "While Greenbaum finds it 'odd that just one key / let me in my front door / and into my life every day,' her fluidly, even propulsively written second collection is itself a splendid key to everyday experience."--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (Best Books 2012: Poetry) "Readers can be grateful that the poems collected in The Two Yvonnes are between covers at last. In it we find Greenbaum, in her clear, Brooklyn vernacular--usually in the first person--exploring the preoccupations of Inventing Difficulty: issues of story and history, of the places that we inhabit and those that inhabit us, especially the specular urban turf of the city."--Lisa Russ Spaar, Los Angeles Review of Books "Greenbaum's achievement rests in her superb control of form and tone, her quirky, self-deprecating Jewish humor, and, when required, the quiet restraint that bespeaks great feeling."--Robin Becker, Women's Review of Books "In breathtaking free verse, Jessica Greenbaum's poetry is packed with descriptive moments of humor, music, imagery and imagination. Entering her narrative-driven world feels like an exhilarating roller coaster ride or a kaleidoscope of surprises."--Greta Aart, Cerise Press "In these autobiographical poems, Greenbaum maintains a light touch and keeps the focus steadily away from psychological theorizing about who did what to whom. She stays resolutely rooted in the down-to-earth, the comic, the commonsensical, and the moral, while not evading the sad and grievous. Greenbaum's poems are domestic and communal, buttressed by a sustaining network of allegiances and loyalties among a circle of friends and family... Greenbaum's subjects may be quotidian, but a handful of poems have an originality and insight that moved me."--Zara Raab, Verse Wisconsin
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Next Door 1 Promised Town 3 House Phone 5 Anthology 7 What We Read Then 9 The First, Youngest Men 11 Seven, Seven, Seventy-Seven 12 The Voice of Peace 14 Houston in the Early Eighties 15 Without Measure 17 Stowaway's Ascent 18 One Key 19 Packing Slip 21 A Line from Jimi Hendrix Comes to Mind 22 Early April 23 "This" and "That" 24 When My Daughter Got Sick 25 Beauty's Rearrangements 26 What For is For 28 Before 29 Cosmic Page 30 A Poem for S. 31 Little White Truck 32 Sonnets for the Autobiographical Urban Dweller 33 Baldo's 34 Perfume's Journey 35 Little "the" Rules the World 37 Gardens, Passover 38 Streaming Nancy 39 The Use of Metaphor 42 God 43 The Gold Standard 44 Marriage Made in Brooklyn 45 Gratitude's Anniversary 47 What to Expect 48 My Hands in Winter 49 Firefly 50 One Block from the Navy Yard 51 The Moment We Can't Stay 52 For You Today 53 No Ideas but in Things 54 The Two Yvonnes 56 Dedications 58
