Customer Reviews

Another Rude Awakening

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This is my new "perfect" gift book for hospital, travel; so much goes on in one page - one small book that can take the place of a shelf of novels or a dozen films, delight or terrify.

This is a wonderful collection of poems/short/essays/word speak of poems. The author writes with intense and colorful clarity--painting vivid images and almost haunting emotional honesty/vulnerability. She is truly a talented writer, and this book will not dissapoint.

I was delighted with this book from start to finish. Here are poems I consider dear old friends, like "A Double Life," about "a girl who loved horses [and] thought / she was a horse," which I remember admiring when it first appeared in Yankee. It was so good, I cut it out and saved it. Then there are new pleasures: the spunky flowers "In the Rose Test Gardens, Portland Oregon," who "don't know the answers, / so they make things up." Or Snow White's (Every Woman's) musings: "For one long moment I was / the only person in a world where / nothing was required of me." ("Snow White Remembers How It Was") Just like the main character in "Magicians," Appel works magic, only she uses words, turning them from the everyday into the transcendent: "She shakes her head / in wonder, the way she did / when my brother / (who is also dead) / mixed up our first reconstituted / frozen orange juice, / and poured / the gorgeous liquid / into a tall, clear glass." Everyone who reads this book will come away transfixed in wonder, as I did.

These are poems about the life of families and the life of dreams -- gorgeously crafted and yet highly accessible. Funny, moving, and just begging to be read aloud, the poems by this acclaimed playwright read like miniature dramas. There are stories about the lives of immigrant Jews on Chicago's South Side, poems about fairy tales, dark,cock-eyed fantasies touched with mordant humor. "In The Rose Test Gardens, Portland, Oregon," the roses are actually subjected to exams (but get by mostly on their looks.)in "Snow White Remembers How It Was," Snow White mourns the peace and quiet she had before the prince's kiss, and in "Vapors" the truth behind an old family story is revealed at last.