Teetering
"Rio Uncle"
Sample Poem from Teetering
Sugar Loaf rose above the sea,
San Cristo stretching his arms
to bless the city at dusk.
He landed in Rio, hid out in
Copacabana, disguised as a poet, wanted
for killing a Cossack with a rock.
He wore a white suit,
spectator shoes, a handkerchief
in his breast pocket.
The girl he married, a beauty mark
above her lip, threw a plate of feijoada
across the table at him.
He visited us in Brooklyn, left
pee on the toilet seat, bought
me a doll with blinking eyes.
I tucked her in at night, gazed
at her dark lashes closing
over lacquered cheeks.
Uncle died,
an undecorated hero,
an unread poet,
unloved by a woman.
His two triumphs,
the dead Cossack,
the doll with blinking eyes.
“Teetering” is an image that runs through this book in both the deepest and most surface of ways. Opening with the poet’s consciousness of ‘teetering’ between the ancient and the modern, Shenkman sets the stage for what is to come: A Jewish woman living in the third millennium, teetering between being a mother and a daughter, ancient history, a modern New York of jazz and walkups. And ‘teetering’ is passed down, like a gene; as she teetered, so does her daughter, between here and now and between internal and external conflicts and desires.
Intimate and restrained, Shenkman shares her experience of the Holocaust and what it feels like to be born to a mother who has lost family. (The weight of her joy as crushing as the silences.
My special picks are the poems where Shenkman herself appears: “Riff on Coupling,” “Riff on Coupling 2” and “Desire.” In the jazz like notes of metered poetry Shenkman finds her rhythm, brings us into the here and now of lust, romance and expectation.
A fine collection of poetry, and an historical recording that adds beauty and specificity to the canon of Jewish writing.
–Joan Gelfand
Harriet Shenkman’s striking debut, Teetering, offers us poems that prove the sustaining power of art. Much like Dostoyevsky’s proclamation in The Idiot, that “beauty will save the world,” the speaker in these simple and haunting poems takes the reader on a journey through the art, music, and artifice that allowed her to survive and even thrive in the face of personal and familial tragedies. These poems mine painful and weighty topics—abandonment, the Holocaust, divorce, disability, dementia—with great sentiment, without being sentimental. This poetry, in its blunt honesty, is hard as armor but protects a beating heart beneath its façade. Unlike the doll with blinking eyes that appears in several of these poems, the perceptive eyes of the poet remain open and see the hard truths of life for what they are. The strength emanating from these poems is palpable so we know, by the end of the collection, that the speaker is going to prevail, no matter what: “I am desperate to conclude,/ no plunder possible.//That loss of mere objects could not obliterate us,/ should the troops arrive.”
–Jennifer Franklin