After the War for Independence

Gerry LaFemina is not so much a presence in contemporary poetry as a blur of movement, a quick phrase of enlightenment, a dharma bum of punk and junk. He watches nuns getting drunk in a bar, hears Leonard Cohen on the juke, drinks the blaze of light in every glass. Like Whitman, who inspired both Kinnell and Kerouac, LaFemina understands the body's demands, "Its sweat, toils, & passions. It's holy vigor." LaFemina rides the rapids of contemporary America: pain and ecstasy, ruin and treasure, angels and vultures, half-moon like a half-eaten cookie are confused in a cascade of feeling, an elegy for wild love and boundless grief. -Michael Simms"What is it about the past / that it seems to want to last, to linger into the present?" poet Gerry LaFemina asks us in this powerful collection of poems. Here, remembrances of a precarious childhood in a decaying city illuminate the details of our contemporary moment. These are songs of innocence and experience, in which the gaze of an adult reminiscent narrator makes meaning of a complicated past-unearthing both unnoticed beauties and unacknowledged terrors. Hurtling into the uncertainties of a future that is simultaneously unrecognizable yet familiar, LaFemina finds foothold in fleeting sweetness, in the beauty of the ephemeral moment. In these gorgeously tumbling lyrical lines, meticulously-honed images and details are polished to a burnished glow by the sheen of memory and loss. LaFemina writes, "This is how / we learn heartache, how even a name can be haunted / because a name can be a house we live in for years / waking in the empty rooms of its syllables." After all that is named within this syllabary of poems, the reader will depart the book feeling recognized, feeling haunted, feeling sung to and prayed for, feeling comforted and irrevocably human. -Lee Ann Roripaugh