Praise for Some Flawed Magic:
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In her poem, “The Sewing Machine,” Patricia Caspers writes, “I have to reach in/with both hands to pull out the weight of the thing.” In her latest collection, Some Flawed Magic, Caspers examines the weightiest of all things: family, death, forgiveness. As I was reading this masterful book, I thought of a line from Rilke’s poem “The Neighbor,” which ends with, “Life is infinitely heavier/than the heaviness of all things.” Caspers’ poems are dense with details of things—both physical and emotional—laid out with poetic and mathematical precision.
--Jennifer Martelli, Harbor Review In this beautiful new book, Some Flawed Magic, poet Patricia Caspers draws detailed portraits of relationships that span both time and place. Each poem brims with sensory detail, including a dying cow who “knelt prayer-like on front legs;” and a family sewing machine that “hides in its scratched cabinet like an ivory treasure.” Against a backdrop of pastures, trees, rain-gullied snails, distant pick ups, and the mildew scent of geraniums, Caspers crafts a world where, “All of my childhood/ was this: gorging on neglect, praying/ for my eyes to glow golden.” By the end of the collection, the poet has studiously examined not only her own life, but the lives of her children. The book closes with infinite wisdom: “This is not grief,/ but its sister perhaps,/ the goodbye of growing up.” Some Flawed Magic paints three generations of care, kindness, and intimacy with craftful strokes and colors.
~Patricia Colleen Murphy, Author of Bully Love |
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Patricia Caspers' second collection seeks to reconcile grief with growing up. Some Flawed Magic is an equation, and Caspers solves for all the “theorems scratched…in childhood notebooks” as she maps familial stories both past and present. Caspers asks the tough questions that make us redefine who we are in relation to the people who made us and the people who we shape in turn. Poets are the orators of truth and time, and Caspers asks “Isn’t the past always for sale?” Some Flawed Magic is a record of ancestry that examines how “to break a family / to hold it together.” These fervent narratives ground readers in a rich description of place where “pine-lined roads” reveal and “divulge secrets / from [their] depths.” Some Flawed Magic is a wondrous coupling of memory with reality. Readers will be left tender and moved.
~John McCarthy, Author of Scared Violent Like Horses
~John McCarthy, Author of Scared Violent Like Horses
In the Belly of the Albatross, Glass Lyre Press
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“In these moving poems, many of them dramatic monologues spoken by women, Patricia Caspers conjures up the lives of historical individuals — a black slave midwife who [gives] ‘Justice her dowry,’ Amelia Earhart’s mother, waiting hopefully for her daughter’s return. And she reimagines the figures of Greek and Hebrew legend– the Gorgon who begs for ‘the gift of monstrosity’ the biblical Ruth, revealing a sensuality the Bible does not allow her … Caspers’ poems flourish and grow by turning themselves undaunted to the light.”
— Chana Bloch In the Belly of the Albatross is available from Glass Lyre Press. |
