Customer Reviews

Frameless Windows, Squares of Light: Poems

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Cathy Song's poems represent a sensitivity to the material world, the tenous connections between people, and the way in which culture suffuses our experience. As a young mother, I especially appreciate her sensitive exploration of the ties between mother and child. Without becoming maudlin or sentimental, she still captures the conflict of connectedness and separateness that this relationship entails. In Water Wings she writes about her son learning to swim. She speaks of the morning he leaves behind his inflatable "Water wings": This is sadness, I tell myself,/ the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,/ because he will not remember/ that he and beauty were aligned,/ skimming across the water, nearly airborne,/ on his first solo flight/.../ At the other end,/ in another time frame,/ he waits for me-/ having already outdistanced this body,/ the one that slipped from me like a fish,/ floating, free of itself.