Re-Coupling
Coming 2025
Coming Fall 2025 - Kelsay Books
I Want to be Buried in my Favorite Nightie.
from Re-Coupling
The siren-red one
with low back, satiny-to-the-touch skirt, and v of roses
sauntering toward my not-huge breasts,
“Just right” he says, as he well should,
a man experienced at making people feel good
as they dole out bucks for a cause.
I feel safe in his car which happens
to be a Porche SUV. Not that I care about posh cars
or thick gold chains.
Not even foie gras makes me drool.
It’s weird. I am “had” in a good way.
A frisson of excitement
conjures fantasies of my younger self.
More satisfying than tax returns,
a gourmet cooking class, or
running on a treadmill.
A toast to pleasure
and thumbs down to his arthritic knees,
irregular heartbeat,
and my 95-percent-filled tooth in danger
of becoming extinct.
"Dylan Thomas wrote, "Life always offers you a second chance." Harriet Shenkman’s collection “Re-Coupling” is about that second chance. Beginning with envy at a couple she sees at a Modigliani exhibit while suffering from loss of her husband “at a ripened age,” Shenkman’s narrative poetry tells the story of the process of meeting the new love, evoking red lingerie, dancing to Motown, good food, and good wine, notwithstanding hearing aids, illness, “six vials of prescription drugs,” and having to get out of bed to pee in the middle of the night. There is both skill and humor here. “Time itself, a gift,” Shenkman writes, this collection also a gift. We should all have this second grasp at the ring—here silver “un-wedding” rings—if/when we need that, and despite with whom we choose to be buried later. As poets we should all be able to render the ride as delightfully as Shenkman has."
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—Susana H. Case, author of If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Book"
"Re-Coupling opens to loss of a spouse, “grief my stealth companion.” Simultaneously, these poems delight in newly-found mature passion, its insecurities and pleasures, aspiring to “interrogate the difference between loss and love.” “Lucky, you’re so sexy,” her lover comments, the speaker thinking, “I pray it’s my brain you adore, the sensuous / synapses and hilly lobes, / the sultry nature of my soul.” Yet, she admits, it’s “the wild boy” in her lover she “admires,” the one who “cycles down the thorniest road.” Her new muse, “awakening a poem,” as Shenkman is awakening and stirring her readers."
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—Yerra Sugarman, author, Aunt Bird
"Consider the last lines of many of Shenkman’s poems. Like her or our lives, endings don’t necessarily remain finite. Shenkman’s open outward, offering ironic comment, questions, surprise, and delight:
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“Eleven white buttons saunter down the midline / from the V neck to just below the knee. / A deliberate choice from the crowded dress rack. / He’ll need to unfasten each tiny button,” and “Give me lip gloss and highlighted hair, / a drizzle of pleasure / and the will to hang on.”
“The will to hang on” is embodied in the face of the deepest loss, coupled with the help of King Solomon, who shows up in “Song of Songs.”
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—Estha Weiner, author, This Insubstantial Planet