Labor

I have to keep looking; try to see more speak more turn away less says Lisa DeSiro in her fine first book Labor. And this is what her poems do: they keep their eyes peeled their ears open and their hearts receptive. (Boston street bustle comes vividly alive in many of these poems.) But receptivity demands a tolerance for paradox and DeSiros poems--in disarmingly simple idiomatic language--plumb the secrets of the worlds contradictions. Go ahead enjoy this day begins a poem titled 9/11 Anniversary Public Garden. At home with the prose poem as well as the tightly rhymed lyric DeSiro distills memorable music from the most colloquial moments--We were all thumbs on our dumb phones--and offers readers a vibrant panoply of sights and sounds captured and conveyed in her impressively taut writing.-- Steven Cramer author of Clangings and Goodbye to the Orchard