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"My lover tells me I am like this place./I tell him what I miss: the slap of leaves/on skin and air that's like a damp embrace". The poems of this debut have a Cinderella-like innocence, transforming ugliness into beauty and waving the wand of well-crafted metaphor over all they encounter. The horrific suicide of a grandfather, a mother's cancer, the mourning for a stillborn child, the potential foreclosure of a neighbor's farm are all recounted with a refined clarity. Yet through it all, de los Santos manages to frame life's traumas with a voice that can seem borrowed from the Stage Manager in Our Town: "Some years/were fair, but most were bad./The taxes, worse than weevil, tried/to take each dime she had". However, there are also poems, such as "Io's Gift", that evoke, through their subtlety and sensuality, the pleasures of the ever-changing consciousness of the female body: "I learned myself, bit/ by bit, or maybe I/ should say I dawned/ upon myself, a slow dawning". There are also glamorous poems, including "Supermodel", and "Perfect Dress", in which the poet indulges in herself as an object of perfect beauty: "Someone will murmur, /'She is sublime, '/will be precisely right, and I will step, /with incandescent shoulders, / into my perfect evening". In its worked simplicity, this is a first book that offers a formula of hope and clarity when confronting life's trials and tribulations.
About the author
Marisa de los Santos grew up in northern Virginia, received a B.A. from the University of Virginia, an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and a Ph.D. in English literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in such publications as
Poetry, Chelsea, Western Humanities Review, and
Prairie Schooner. She teaches at the University of Delaware and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
