From Publishers Weekly
Raz's varied and serious new collection plays a range of styles while sticking closely to the poet's life. About half the volume describes Raz's troubled, but finally heartwarming, experience with her daughter "Sarah," who changed her sex to become Raz's adult son "Aaron." Other poems examine Raz's extended family she is especially good on the very old (in a shocking poem set in a nursing home) and on maternity and childbirth. Raz (Divine Honors) has long taught English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where she edits the journal Prairie Schooner; some vivid verse describes the Nebraska landscape and its hardscrabble citizens. Whether she writes of Aaron or Sarah, funerals or fields, Raz's tone remains sincere and open: "Nothing to explain, no shield," she writes, "of paperthin skin between history and the untender world." Raz employs, among other devices, the hortatory intimacy of '70s confessionalism; the expansive verse-paragraphs of an Albert Goldbarth or a Deborah Digges; and a more disjunctive approach, often expressed in couplets or short prose poems. Many lines seem over-the-top; some are mawkish: "you, for all we've been through,/ are identical genetically to the daughter you were." Raz does better with terser, harsher verse, as in "Doing the Puzzle/Angry Voices," where "Every book that documents birth/ puts on to gender a meaning./ That piece of the junco tree is filled with sparrows." Always articulate and sometimes well-crafted, the volume relies too heavily on its subjects, yet its pleasures, like its concerns, are genuine. (Oct.) Forecast: Raz's principal subject her child's transsexualism gives the book an obvious publicity angle, and perhaps a niche audience as well (not transgender people, but their families). Her longtime presence at Prairie Schooner, for which she has edited "Best of" anthologies, and her editorship of Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer (2001), have given her a solid reputation. Throw in a public radio appearance or glossy magazine mention, and the book could take off.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
What subject could be harder for a mother to document than her daughter's sex-change operation? "Aaron is glad to be rid of breasts. I look/ in the mirror and see nothing familiar,/ scars and absence." Some of the strongest poems in this collection by poet and anthologizer Raz (Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer) focus on that transformation: "You're the one that had the sex change./ I've always been as I am." Sometimes Raz captures the pain, grief, and acceptance beautifully, but other times, as in "Prelude," she avoids the specificity she needs to translate this experience into art: "I'm here, child, your absolute company/ as you are changed - radically - from one thing to another." The poems on other topics - youth, writing workshops in a Mennonite community, and, particularly, the Wonder Woman poems - can seem out of place. However, a series of poems on medical topics do fit in, including one on a heart transplant operation, another on breast cancer, and the final poem about the death of a friend's mother. Though readers will focus on the transgender poems, Raz writes most evocatively when she either celebrates the flesh or catalogs what can go wrong with it. Recommended for larger collections. - Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
