Customer Reviews

Lot of My Sister (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series, Ser. 2, No. 10)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was surprised to find a gem in this slim, inexpensive volume of poetry. "Lot of my Sister" signals the arrival of a fine new poetic voice. Her poems are startling and bold, covering the emotional landscape, from love to the pain of a physical disability. Her words will speak especially to women as there are explorations into the lives of the women behind Houdini and the painter Rembrandt. Her images are breathtaking and real, yet the poems read quickly and stay with you.

What's even more surprising is that such powerful truths can come from someone so young,(much like Sylvia Plath or early Louise Gluck) and I look forward to seeing what else will come from her pen in the future.

Buy this book. It will be worth a great deal someday.

These are surprising and rich poems. I love the Wick Poetry Program for their continued interest in and support of the chapbook form, and this is one of their best in recent years. As editor of a fairly prominent literary magazine several years back, I got all their chapbooks in the mail for possible review. Stine's work stood out from the rest, and is maybe the only one that I stole from the office before leaving. The work has confessional overtones, but the craft is what really sparkles. Sensuous and pathological (in an good way) at times, this is good stuff.

Of course her newer poems--uncollected here--are even better, but you'll have to wait on those for the full-length book that we all know will be coming out eventually.

I remember "little treasure chest" books from my childhood. The very name of the series conjured up the delights one might find inside. The covers were shiny and new and smooth and were a metaphor for the gift of reading. The size indicated that it would not take long to find the jewels within. Alison Stine's "Lot Of My Sister" is much the same sort of book.
A slender chapbook, it is clothed in a cover that is a delight to touch and not so brilliantly colored that one will expect exlosions within its covers. This is a book of poetry, after all, and one comes to it expecting a different kind of experience.
By any standard, this is a lovely book of poetry but it most touching when Stine describes the special sounds of being deaf. When she touches on this aspect of her own life, the poems become close and personal. As she says, they "come back to me as music."

Consider this:

From "Fields Beyond Fields:"
"...one hand memorized
the closed mouths of lockers..."

This slim volume is also full of moments when we share other bits of humanity with the author:
"...the swallow of our morning cups."

and the image of a cancer survivor:
"eyelashes like tea leaves
in her morning cup?"

"Lot Of My Sister" is a little books that offers twenty-five pages for twenty-five moments of respite--moments that anyone can "work in" to their schedule and so enrich their lives.

I could have used twenty-five more delectible pages, twenty-five more memorable moments.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of "This is the Place"

For the price, you can not beat the material of which Stine painstainkly provides to her readers.

The age of the poet is hardly relevant to the poems, which contrasts to other reviews. Whether one has experienced a disability or the emotions of which the poet envelopes, the reader--no matter his or her age--can not help but be brought into a world that travels the span of childhood memories to the emotive immediacy of adulthood. There is no doubt that Stine delicately chooses the freshest, most memorable images with a keen eye and heart, as each poem reveals her ability to give the reader (and quite possibly herself) the best language. She leaves us a fully bloomed chapbook of poems where each one weaves a unified story that is humanely historical--yet each piece stands quite lovely on its own.

Alison Stine, Lot of My Sister (Kent State University Press, 2001)

I am an idiot and returned this to the library before pulling quotes from it, so I won't be able to offer up evidence of anything I'm going to say here. You have my apologies. And I should probably also apologize for expecting this book to be some sort of mishmash of, say, Ira Sadoff and Debra Allbery (whom I consider two of the best poets currently working). You see, I've been trying to get my paws on a copy of Lot of My Sister for almost four years, and various library systems have failed me time and again. When you find yourself in a situation like that, especially with a book from an imprint that rarely fails to put out fantastic material, you run the risk of building the book up in your head to mythical proportions. In the case of Lot of My Sister, this risk was exacerbated by Stine's second book, Ohio Violence, released in 2008 and the subsequent winner of much praise and a pretty big award. (And with that title, the link to Sadoff was cemented in my head, I should note.) So when one out-of-the-way library finally scored me a copy, hopefully I can be forgiven for thinking this was going to be the second coming of Robert Lowell.

It's not. I'm not going to say anything against Stine's words, for as with many of the Wick poets, she is more than capable of putting them together in a way that conveys what she's trying to get across in a very effective manner. And while I don't normally apply this metric when reading poetry (I grew up on the surrealists, after all), back when I was a poetry student myself, knee-high to a grasshopper or thereabouts, Dave Smith introduced my class to what he called the "So What?" test when he was guest-lecturing one day. (He did so while critiquing another student's work, thankfully, not mine.) And it's always been in the back of my head, even though much of the time I consciously reject it. But it kept rearing its ugly head when I was reading some of the poems in this volume. A few of them just don't pass the test; it's not that I don't know what they're about, or that Stine doesn't do a bang-up job of showing me what they're about, I just wondered why she was taking the effort to illuminate them.

This is not true of the entire book, or even the majority of the book; it's two poems, three at most. In a book of twenty-five pages, that resounds a little louder than it normally would, but still, this is worth picking up. ***

This book reads like a good undergraduate dissertation. The language is "pretty", but lacks real depth. I look forward to future writings when this young poet has matured.

If you think this is the work of an immature poet, you should go back to grad school. The poems have a lot going on between the lines and it takes a mature mind to understand their true depth. Try reading them again.