Review
"For most, pain is a feeling one spends effort to prevent or deny: from the broken leg to the broken promise. But if one is determined to feel deeply, all emotions must register. In this collection, Sharon Kraus invites us to experience deeply poems where love is as excruciating as the wound." -- Kimiko Hahn
"Sensual, passionate, earthly and unearthly together, Sharon Kraus' work brings a fierce grief up into the sane daylight of her words. The most heartbreaking poems in Generation are the childhood poems, but the others reflect that childhood's fire: the book is 'homemade,' and it has a rare necessity about it, and gallantry." -- Jean Valentine
"These poems are the difficult children of McCarriston's Eva-Mary and Old's Satan Says. Raw, rangy, incantatory creatures who sing of the dark side of the human family, of survival and what comes after." -- Dorianne Laux
The Address
Afterlife
At The Open-air Cafe A Friend
The Caretaker
The Coroner's Assistant
The Cup
The Dazzle
The Fence
Finally
The First Morning With Him
Flight Delayed By Fog
Geniture
The Gesture
The Girls' Home
Kaddish
The Labor
Loving My Mother
The Maker
Making Dinner, Thursday Night
The Message Of My Grandmother's Death
My Mother Bathing
On The Afternoon After The Brakes Fail
Paradise
A Pardon
Penance
The Relic
Rubbing My Father's Back
The Scar
The Sign
That Which Is Palpable
To The Day
Transgressor
The Traveler
The Visit
What I Could Not Save
What If
What The Door Gives Onto
When They Named Me
Wish-shopping
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
"Sensual, passionate, earthly and unearthly together, Sharon Kraus' work brings a fierce grief up into the sane daylight of her words. The most heartbreaking poems in Generation are the childhood poems, but the others reflect that childhood's fire: the book is 'homemade,' and it has a rare necessity about it, and gallantry." -- Jean Valentine
"These poems are the difficult children of McCarriston's Eva-Mary and Old's Satan Says. Raw, rangy, incantatory creatures who sing of the dark side of the human family, of survival and what comes after." -- Dorianne Laux
The Address
Afterlife
At The Open-air Cafe A Friend
The Caretaker
The Coroner's Assistant
The Cup
The Dazzle
The Fence
Finally
The First Morning With Him
Flight Delayed By Fog
Geniture
The Gesture
The Girls' Home
Kaddish
The Labor
Loving My Mother
The Maker
Making Dinner, Thursday Night
The Message Of My Grandmother's Death
My Mother Bathing
On The Afternoon After The Brakes Fail
Paradise
A Pardon
Penance
The Relic
Rubbing My Father's Back
The Scar
The Sign
That Which Is Palpable
To The Day
Transgressor
The Traveler
The Visit
What I Could Not Save
What If
What The Door Gives Onto
When They Named Me
Wish-shopping
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
Product Description
Generation maps the survival of a traumatic childhood. Kraus masters the toxic fall-out of abusive experiences by rendering them fiercely meaningful, almost as a dance or a biblical drama. It is an American life more terrible than we are accustomed to seeing, but one that reveals unexpected complexity in the world of K-marts and bowling alleys, a vision that tolerates contradictions that will never be resolved.
