Upstairs Listening

<p>Through musically muscular verse at once tender and unflinching Melinda LePere leads us along the fault lines of a seasoned life into spare domestic spaces rooms populated by ghosts and puppets Sunday gravy and severed limbs. Here the music of the riptide competes with a cathedral's pipe organ and the slap and scratch of cars with a vacuum's roar. And to all of it a child is always <em>upstairs listening</em>. These poems know their weight. And they know us too how we sometimes wonder if every family is a kind of prison. Listen someone is rhyming a ball against the house. Here we are skittish as horses a flailing animal fighting for release. Here we are heard; here we are seen.</p><ul><li>Jennifer Sperry Steinorth author of <em>A Wake with Nine Shades</em> and <em>Her Read A Graphic Poem</em></li></ul>