Ilze's Daughter

<p><em>Ilze's Daughter</em> invites you into the intimate world of an immigrant girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania. A memoir in verse this collection of poems captures experiences of displacement loss struggle first love family resilience. Bolster traces her family's uprooting from WWII occupied Latvia abandoning her mother's farm <em>Don't ask me./I really can't say/ if fear surged up suffocating/ mother so breath came only/in gasps/ as she climbed /onto an overloaded wagon . . .</em> The images and vignettes are personal and crack open a door into her world of duality: honoring her Latvian heritage and grieving her mother's losses yet discovering a new world of delights (<em>We called them the Rockies/huge boulders as if some god/had scattered them among the trees/just for us to climb and skin our knees.</em>) the comradeship of six siblings and falling in love with an American boy. Bolster includes an addendum putting into perspective family events within the context of world events.</p><p><br></p>