Customer Reviews

Small Knots

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Agodon's first book deals with the tangles that loss brings to a life - the loss of love, the loss of health, the loss of loved ones - as well as the philosophical musings of a well-read mind about the connections we make in life with writers, places, even objects. The writing is well-paced and lyrical, with humorous and heartbreaking twists. Her word choices and images are always apt. Favorite poems of mine include "Sailing Lepidoptera" and "After My Last Chemo Appointment, I Steal Page Six from The Children's Illustrated Book of Bible Stories." Here are some lines from "Pablo Neruda Lemons," a particularly sensual poem: "Some say you will fall/ in love after sucking them/dry,//that if you cut through/ their center, the sea will/ open in your veins.//Believe me when I say they are/ the tips of flame/ you undress in front of...You will want to be in the hands that peel them,/ to disappear/ in this stranger's skin."
Enjoy this book!

Agodon's first collection is as lively as its stunning cover promises. The 50 poems are neatly divided into three thematic sections, each spotlighting a different chapter of a woman's life: family matters, romance, the betrayals of the body. These sections are tightly and cleverly held together by a sewing motif which weaves its way throughout the poems. The reader will find much humor here as well as bold confrontations with family secrets and breast cancer. The reader will also find sensuous imagery and imaginative metaphors, as in these lines from "Living Room Explorers":

Let me slip off my boot of Italy, my sweater
of Zimbabwe and map the dining room table,
the chairs, the matching ocean-colored plates.

We're a number on the earth: latitude wine,
longitude bread and trying
to become our own island.

Agodon writes in free verse but with a formal elegance in this collection which records both the delights and the shadows of a woman's life.

In this stunning collection Agadon takes us from the Mexican highway to topless beaches, from Cleopatra to Revelations. While her world is vast and wide, Agodon's images are, indeed, small knots of craft and surprise. In poem after poem, this reader delights in the syllables and sounds of lines like "it's the unbutton my shirt conclusion, the tango with needles in my flesh-colored suit."

These poems tell of lives lived deeply in pain and delight. "It's easy to wake up in someone's poem" explores how we end up living in worlds we never expected. "God sets us in boats and pushes us on to the lake," Agadon tells us. I for one, want this book with me as I take the ride.