This collection opens softly, like a flute solo beginning a concerto. Saiser whispers, “Look at the world. Notice everything." She shows us that a “nobody bird” is just as worthy of a poem as a rare breed. In “Gratis,” she acknowledges small things, like free plants, to larger things live has given her. She pulls us in by transforming the everyday, by speaking to us like she’s a close friend. How lucky to have such insightful friends! Saiser’s poems are a self-help guide for how to live one’s life with optimal appreciation and minimal regret, but she isn’t preachy. She’s simply willing to let us learn from her mistakes.
Meanwhile, Saiser is building to a crescendo with full orchestra. By the time you reach her mom and dad poems in part II, you’ll hear tympani and cymbals. Even though her writing is beautifully restrained, the impact is intense, especially if you have lost parents. In “What He Wanted,” she realizes in hindsight how insensitive it was to lecture her dad on laughter as the best medicine when he was hospitalized, the pain so severe he’d stopped eating. He asked her to bring him his shoes and help him go home. Instead, she told the night nurse,
“and I came at her heels traitor-like his one last
chance to walk out on two legs
when in fact he needed a buddy he
needed a daughter he needed his shoes.”
The mother-daughter relationship is always complicated, especially when one feels,
“…there must have been
a day something happened
to the unmarked child she was,
something I can’t reach back
and save her from . . .”
(“My Mother the Child”)
After poems like that, it’s nice to have a little whimsy and humor for balance. Saiser delivers with “Each Wrong Choice Was a Horse I Saddled,” which begins
“I rode a little way down the road, got off,
and saddled another.
I got better at saddling,
faster at getting onboard . . . .”
Need another lift? “What I Think My Real Self Likes”:
“. . .
She grabs my to-do list
from the counter and beats me with it.
Stop making this crappy fuss,
she says and stomps off
in her red leather boots.”
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