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Goodbye to the Orchard: Poems

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Goodbye to the Orchard is the fourth collection of Steven Cramer's poems. The free-verse syncopation delves deeply into memories, and thrives upon presenting familiar icons and situations in a fresh and sometimes skewed viewpoint. The middle section of the book deals directly with the death of Cramer's sister, and "talk straight" in honor of her memory. An emotional and thought-provoking anthology. "Miracle Gro": I was finishing one book about ghosts / and about to start another about ghosts / while she slept. "If life is ordinary, / so is death," our sister (soon my sister) told me // between books, then offered her solution / for my pitiful, languishing garden - / its tomatoes oozing a thin, black blood, / its shrunken peppers, with their stunted heads: // Miracle Gro and water, but not from the tap. / Our sister, our dying one... Looking up, / we watched the March light she was lying in, / unseasonably green, through the hospice window, // warm even for the South - and hatefully so, / to one who's never been much good with soil.