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Overview
In her second collection of poems, Rachel Zucker returns to a more autobiographical stance and writes about the particulars of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood--experiences that radically surprised her. But this is no simple reportage. With candor, humor, and compassion, Zucker discovers a new poetic territory: a landscape between story and fragment, a way of telling that is neither confessional nor intellectually detached. At the cliff-edge of narrative, a high place where language is the rope and falling the perception, Zucker's poems are unsentimental, true to the disjunctive experiences of loving, giving birth, raising a child, being lonely, being alive. A poetry of the body, of desire, about human frailty and strength, The Last Clear Narrative fills a void in the history of women writing about everyday experience and speaks to the nature of narrative itself.Synopsis
Radical, intimate poems about marriage and motherhood.
Library Journal
While Zucker moves away from the myth-based narrative of her first volume (Eating the Underworld), very little is "clear" or direct in this fascinating new collection. The journey here is no longer Persephone's but a personal movement through marriage and childbirth, a theme that has been overplayed in too many recent poetry collections. But this is where Zucker's idiosyncrasies and craft take over. With one or two swift flicks of her verbal wand, she embraces everything from the Holocaust ("so few ways to murder, birth, memory") and Little Red Riding Hood to a delivery room that at first seems a strobe-lit disco. The imagery is arresting and memorable: "the post partum a nest like a bird with only plastic or glass slivers to build with" or, at 21 weeks, "my genitals a one-way exit." Comparisons with Plath spring to mind, yet the violence in Zucker's poetry is ultimately life-affirming. Nonlyrical and at times nonsyntactical, this book might offend some readers and confuse others but should still be required reading.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.