Bite Every Sorrow

A collection of energetic and inquisitive poetry invites the reader to explore beauty, heartbreak, loss, and outrage

Ras plunges beneath the skin of consciousness and tumbles in the mind's coursing, then gets her bearings and sends her tidings in poems that surge across the page like waves on a beach. The tropical ocean, lined with palms and shimmering with flashing, silvery life, is, in fact, her habitat of choice, but wherever she places her poetic persona, she navigates life with her senses on full alert. Everything she witnesses, overhears, ingests, and touches is a catalyst for her penetrating imagination, which turns even the simplest things iridescent with myriad shades of meaning. Witty and ardent, Ras marvels at marriage, motherhood, and memory; compassionate and generous, she ponders loneliness, grief, and poverty, swinging readily from the private to the global, the everyday to the eternal. Entranced by motion, she elevates journeys on buses and trains to metaphorical rites of passage, then muses over questions of proximity. Look how close we can be without making contact: no wonder love is miraculous. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, this is a sonorous and enrapturing collection. Donna Seaman

Ras's first collection, winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award, selected by C.K. Williams, explores what constitutes a sense of family today. These readable autobiographical scrapbook-collages, showing how woman's experience bears a multigenerational identity, are about pregnancy, giving birth, childhood and raising children, adulthood, ethnic (Polish) grandparents, home and work, "the gross margin/ of greed, desire billowing like a tall ship," and what it means "to spend a lifetime together." With a long-lined, striding quality, as though hiking through "whole vistas" of time, abundant and ruminative sequences of precise details ("even the saddest ones") weave together "every sorrow" of aging and "the way/ children are given to dreams." Ras transforms what might appear to be clutter with a wide-angle focus on images that depict how ordinary personal memories grow into a beautiful "life of the mind" that transcends selfhood. Reading these spacious poems, one concludes with Ras, that despite "the sadness" of memory, one "can have love,/ though often it will be mysterious." Highly recommended for all public libraries.?Frank Allen, North Hampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
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