Touring

<p>Marjie Giffin's chapbook debut <em>Touring</em> traverses the landscape of America family and social inequities with observant detail. An encounter with a homeless woman on the steps of a Milwaukee church is just as thought-provoking as the poet's recollection of stepping past shivering homeless persons on the periphery of Harvard. Poignant reflections emerge from both a dusty drive through a ghostly Southwestern village and a middle-aged dip into a pristine Northern lake. A sense of others' entitlement arises when the poet faces restrictions against viewing a New England landscape in Dead End.</p><p><br></p><p>Long-ago love is experienced anew in Back in '73 and heartbreak recounted in The Potted Plant.</p><p><br></p><p>A doting mother and grandmother Giffin writes with obvious devotion to her offspring in poems like A Place of Peace and Grandbaby. Sardonic humor flourishes in her retelling of traveling with adult offspring in Backseat Rider while the joy of road-tripping with friends is apparent in Girls Trip.</p><p><br></p><p>The title poem Touring takes a step back in time to a favorite card game of Giffin's father while the collection's ending poem Empty City recreates the eerily quiet atmosphere caused by today's very real experience the Coronavirus.</p><p><br></p><p>Poems from Giffin's chapbook have also appeared in <em>Blue Heron Review</em>; <em>Flying Island</em>; <em>Poetry Quarterly</em>; <em>Northwest Indiana Literary Journal</em>; <em>Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing</em>; <em>So It Goes: The Journal of the</em> <em>Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Nos. 6 and 7</em>; <em>St. Katherine Review</em>; <em>The</em> <em>Lives We Live(d) In: An Anthology of Poems about Social Justice</em>; and <em>Tipton Poetry Journal.</em></p><p><br></p>