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This unique memoir is heartbreakingly poignant in its careful examination of the cycles of loss and grief that ultimately define life. Grief, however, does not entirely define it. Readers also find poems influenced by pop culture, the author’s Jewish identity, and Southern Californian culture. The author also bravely shares their experiences of navigating the superficial ideal society created for women that caused so many to embark on endless dieting trends and succumb to eating disorders. Music holds a paramount role in the text, and many of the poems lend a nod to unforgettable musicians like Jerry Garcia, Peter Frampton, Roger Daltrey, and Robert Plant.
Making the collection successful is its unique structure, which balances poetry and poetically written essays to form a tale of personal vulnerability and a life lived vividly. Many of the poems and essays are centered on the author’s experiences of growing up in an observant Jewish family, and she frequently describes being “raised in a milk-without-meat kosher household.” Food culture was not only integral to the author’s familial recollections, but also her recollections of Southern California. She writes, “I ate my way through the Valley: chocolate sodas, greasy cheeseburgers and salty fries at Fire Brigade.” The book’s focus on food culture and its importance in social gatherings, nonetheless, is small compared to one brief confession the author makes in “Stuffed”: “I ate to fill a blank, one I felt in the form of a gaping hole I couldn’t name.” Emotional eating and its consequences are also key themes in essays like “The Beautiful Ugly.” In this essay, the author suggests, “The ideal beauty of the era was slender and tan with big boobs and long, flowing hair, preferably blonde.” The author states, “I was a Synagogue girl; pale, flat, and chubby.” The essay explores how diet and exercise culture influenced girls as young as fourteen years old and how an inability to attain the superficial ideal frequently led to depression, eating disorders, drug and substance addictions, and even suicide.
As the collection progresses, readers discover painful poems and essays detailing the deaths of the author’s father and then the author’s husband. The book’s eponymous poem is a poignant one, detailing the missing persons report the speaker filed in hopes of finding her husband. The poem “Souvenirs and Evidence” reveals that the speaker’s husband perished in a skiing accident. The speaker receives a “Zip-Loc of belongings” that includes a “taxi wallet, damp / from melted snow with twelve, crisp hundred-dollar bills.” The attention to detail given about the material items obtained by the rescuers is clinical and described so vividly that readers can see the items. The details allow readers to enter the speaker’s shock and loss. What this collection adeptly captures is grief and loss’ ebb and flow in each and every life. Though intimately personal, these poems speak to a wider audience and develop a clear universality because of how carefully they explore these subjects. However, what these poems also assert is that these cycles end, but everyone must travel through them at their own pace and recognize when the cycles are ending so that life can continue. The poems in this book will invite readers to explore not only the traumatic moments that have reshaped their lives profoundly but also to appreciate and memorialize the happy, joyful events, even the simple ones, like sharing a joke with one’s father or significant other, occasions people are so quick to forget.
A 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist