Archives

Review By: Nicole Conti

In Even the Dog Was Quiet, Margaret R. Sáraco crafts a haunting and emotional collection of poems that delve into the fragility of memory, the weight of loss, and the resilience of love. From the very first moments, the book establishes a poignant tone with jarring imagery of a burning house, a powerful metaphor for the slow, inevitable destruction that time and loss inflict on everything we hold dear. Yet, in the face of such loss, what remains is memory. Throughout the collection, Sáraco reflects on how love—whether for family, fleeting lovers, or friends—lingers in the fragments of memory we preserve, like echoes of a once-thriving home now reduced to ash. Her poems emphasize the importance of remembering, of holding onto the pieces of our past that define us, even when everything else is lost.

In reference to The Unlocked Door, Sáraco’s poetry serves as a “dose of fresh air cleansing a complex world.” Her work focuses on small, flickering moments, whether jagged with grief or buoyed by the sweet imagery of fruit, wine, and morning glory elixirs. These moments allow the reader to fully immerse themselves in her world, where each memory is carefully dissected and preserved. Sáraco grabs these small moments, milks every detail, and then delicately lays them out on the page, using beautiful poetic devices and vivid sensory elements. In many ways, her poems form a kaleidoscope of personal moments, frozen in time. She alludes to this in the poem Tall Ships, where she writes, “a moment in time caught with oils on canvas or a poet’s words.”

Sáraco skillfully orchestrates these themes of loss and love with mood. Take, for instance, the contrast of frigidness and warmth in Bobby and the Bonfire. The poem captures a heartbreak that shifts into a heartwarming end—the coldness of young heartbreak dissolving into warmth when the speaker gifts a ring to her future daughter. In ‘Between the Sheets’, the mood is heavy, cold, and sharp, underscoring the tragedy of loss with lines like:
“His words fall on our bed, gray shards
now next to my inexperienced and young body, mournful and
scared.”

Here, the sharpness of grief and regret is palpable. The poem’s coldness contrasts sharply with the warmth of memory in ‘Pink Hula Hoop’, where, despite the surrounding grayness, a glimmer of hope in the memory of her son’s childhood toy glistens, high up in the trees. It is a reminder that, even in the most somber of memories, brightness and hope can emerge.

Saraco’s writing is also glazed with poetic devices that further the beauty of these moments. The line “the day she dies in her sleep” demonstrates her skillful use of sibilance and alliteration, a technique she’s perfected throughout the book, as seen in phrases like “Slicing flesh… wrapping pounds of fillets in wax paper and plastic wrap while sweat drips down her face.” Some of her other notable uses of alliteration include “sun-starved skin,” “boots, battling bluefish,” and “disease disrupting our days.”

With the ‘End So Close, We Only See Beauty’ is another example of Sáraco’s brilliance, particularly in her metaphor of the bright green parakeet, stark against its sterile environment, “monochrome of confinement.” It echoes her mother’s vibrant spirit, which stands in sharp contrast to the cold, limiting space around her. In ‘Cookies’, Sáraco taps into sensory detail with lines like, “it’s filled with brown and black shoes that smell like grandma’s old leather bag left out in the rain.” This sensory detail pulls the reader into a world where memory and the senses are inextricably linked.

Beyond memory and love, Sáraco touches on other significant themes, including the struggles of an immigrant family and feminism, particularly in Dear So and So, where she explores the myths designed to keep women compliant. The collection traces the threads of girlhood and womanhood, showing how they intertwine throughout life.

In Recycle, 2017, she ponders, “Why do I despair amid such beauty?” The book itself answers this question: we despair from beauty. It’s the pain that spills from love—the beauty of it, but also the great despair in its loss. This is why remembering is so important: because, in remembering, we hold onto the beauty of love and the pain of its absence.

In the title poem, ‘Even the Dog Was Quiet’, Sáraco teaches us the value of memory, not just as a means of preserving the past. The speaker writes everything down so the heart can remember when the mind has forgotten. Through this collection, Sáraco shows that memory is all we have left when everything else is gone. Toward the book’s conclusion, she reflects with envy on her son’s precise memory and muses about how we will all be reduced to “reminders of life’s past.” In this reflection, there is an irony: Sáraco, herself, has created a lasting memorial—Even the Dog Was Quiet—a book of memories that will endure long after the moments they describe have passed. In Sáraco’s own words, “Really, we are here for a moment, and then we are gone.” But her work has left many of her memories- which deserve to be remembered.

Nicole Conti

Review By: John Sweeder

Majorie Maddox’s chapbook, The Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, is a collection of 34 ekphrastic poems that were originally inspired by the author’s 2018 visit with her studio-artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafter, to Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum’s (AVAM) exhibition entitled The Great Mystery Show.  Influenced by her daughter’s subsequent artwork, Maddox features 18 of Anna Lee’s surrealistic paintings as well as the mixed media, photographs, and paintings of six other contributing artists, several of whose works have also appeared in the AVAM.

Maddox’s poetry explores the themes of positive human relationships, both interpersonal and intrapersonal, as well as the significance of imagination and creativity, improvisation, memory, nostalgia, grief, isolation, and alienation. Incorporating many of the repeated images contained in eighteen of her daughter’s surrealist paintings, Maddox embeds visual symbols—often numbers and letters, words and brief phrases, as well as concrete images and symbols such as chairs, chessboards and sunlight into her poetry, thus melding visual art with poetic language in an emotive symbiotic dance to deepen illustration her relationship with her daughter’s creative process.

In her pantoum, “The Choice,” Maddox uses her daughter’s visual metaphor contained in Hafter’s painting entitled “The Library” to explore one’s intuitive imagination using bibliographic tools—books, bookcases, floors, and ceilings—to seek truth, “The ancient why of creation”—all the while purporting that there is no set path to take in the pursuit of knowledge since we, “hold the pen and paintbrush” to create our own “Open Sesames.” The poem’s narrator further proposes that we not fret about making poor decisions since “splatter[s are] choices, not… mistake[s].”

In “High Top” Maddox, responds to her daughter’s surrealistic painting of the same name. Both artist and poet engage in an imaginary conversation as if seated across from one another in empty chairs separated by a table and chessboard, all of which are precariously balanced upon a seesaw, a “compass-needle pole.” The narrator-poet-mother asks her daughter: “Are we still we in this unseen grief/that keeps trying/ to listen to soul/ and scream?” Anna responds with her metaphorical “King’s Pawn Opening.” The two opponents in this fantasy chess match are unsettled for the moment, suggesting an estranged relationship. Yet, because of their long family history (“knee-deep in nostalgia”), a reproachment has begun: Mother “can almost see [her] breath;/ daughter “can almost touch [her] words.” Their unspoken grief remains on the table unresolved; however, both are “waiting for [each other’s] next moves.”

A lighter, more optimistic tone is struck in Maddox’s poem, “Sun on South Street.”  In this straightforward pantoum, the narrator enables us to imagine what life is like living in a “small quiet room” in a “Big busy city.” Exploring the contrasting themes of isolation versus “camaraderie” and light versus “dark,” we learn that days can be “brightened by the waves of strangers,” “the neighborly sun,” and “outside flowers” on balconies displayed for all to enjoy.

Hafer’s painting, “The Letter E” is an abstract tribute to the creative, right-brained random learner who does not “absorb new information” in a rigid sequential manner. Maddox adapts the theme of her daughter’s work to create an ironic poem of the same name whose narrator morphs into the didactic elementary school teacher we all recognize, the anachronistic school marm who proclaims, “Creativity’s the one transgression/ I won’t allow,” further arguing that curiosity and extraneous questions are no more than “time-wasting, silly digressions…[and] enemies of order.”

Maddox is inspired by the “tender but unsettling portrait” of a pig-tailed pre-pubescent girl holding a black cat, painted by Margaret Munz-Losch. In Maddox’s poem, “Black Cat,” a third-person omniscient narrator tells us that we, as unwanted voyeurs (perhaps the girl’s parents), enter her “stark room.” The anthropomorphized cat she cradles in her arms stares at us with its “bright feline eyes” thinking she doesn’t want us there. The girl’s dull skin squirms like a “pattern of maggots,” her eyebrows are perched like flies above her “dead-sea eyes,” and her tied-up hair is uncombed — all of which the narrator tells us we “cannot see.”  These imagined attributes are symbolic of the alienation that many young preteens experience—that is, they want (and maybe need) their own space to develop and mature. Thus, in the lives of young tweens we adults become as welcome as an “infested larvae of plague” hatching into them.

Maddox’s final poem, a sestina with the oxymoronic title, “Wild Rest,” was inspired by her daughter’s painting of the same name. In this work, the narrator begins by posing and answering the following question, “What does it mean to rest…in “a world so wild?” Maddox claims that through daily measured breathing, relaxed contemplation in a “well-worn chair,” and reliance upon our imagination, we should let our mind “wander out amidst the trees.” By exploring a “paradox of renewal,” we learn that “passive breezes [can] become wind” and that “rest [can become] a carnival tour of the spontaneous,” replete with roller coaster rides, fun houses, and Whack-a-Mole games. Maddox wants us to “Be still and know” and recognize “that breath and wind are cousins.”

As careful readers of literature, we are drawn to Maddox’s chapbook for a few reasons.  First, we readily identify with her motivation in creating this work. In her book’s introduction, “Entering the Gallery,” she tells us directly that she is “looking to escape [her] fears” of dying prematurely from heart disease and wants to spend the remaining time she has left with her daughter.  Many of us identify with this sense of urgency in reconnecting with loved ones while we still can. Time is both short and precious. Next, like Maddox and her daughter, we too enjoy visiting art museums, even small, intimate ones that may contain only a modest number of paintings like the ones in this chapbook. But when art and poetry challenge us to look and read more closely, when art and poetry become melded together, our aesthetic experience is enhanced. Through Maddox’s skill in creating the impressive array of interpretive poetry contained in this collection—poetry that ranges from free verse to sestina, poetry that utilizes the evocative tools of sensory imagery, metaphor, repetition, alliteration, internal and end rhyme—we want to seek out more of her work, and trust that she remains with us for years to come, continuing to engage creatively with her artful daughter, carrying on the centuries-old tradition of ekphrastic poetry.

John Sweeder

Review By: Margaret R. Sáraco

In this semi-autobiographical novel that takes place in Philadelphia and on the Jersey Shore, author Steve Oskie and his main character, Mark Glassman, have much in common: both dropped out of college, have the same taste in music, grew up in Philadelphia, and worked many jobs.

Mark’s journey to adulthood will keep a reader engaged while scratching their heads about his aimlessness. He works a series of odd jobs he is unqualified for, though sometimes he has a talent for something that surprises Mark and the reader. One of his prospective employers remarks in the novel saying, “Is it kosher for me to fire you before you start the job?”Clearly his resume turns into a document of failures.

During off hours, Mark imbibes enough recreational drugs and alcohol to keep himself numb. He fancies himself as a writer, something that simmers throughout the novel but comes across as a real chore to get him motivated. Mark seems to be a smart man with a lot of dumb ideas. Mark educates himself by reading and analyzing Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint, The Universal Baseball Association (a novel by Robert Coover), and The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. During an amusing exchange, he gets caught by his foreman on a construction site reading Goethe’s novel during his lunch break.

Oskie lets the reader see the inner workings of his main character, who can shatter like glass. Mark pursues two women at the same time, although when dealing with women, words like terror and horror come to his mind. At first, his eye set upon Sarah Sloane. He then falls in love with Teresa Devlin, then ping-pongs his affections back to Sarah while more women enter and depart. At one point, Mark reflects: “I was still under the impression that I would never get anywhere with women simply by being myself, taking a genuine interest in them, and becoming a good person.” His fear of relationships harkens back to his parent’s divorce years before and the resulting trauma. He makes it his mission to disassociate himself from his parents and their expectations.

Mark can’t and won’t grow up, however, readers can’t help rooting for him. Because everyone in some aspects of life refuses to grow up too, readers patiently wait to see if Mark will figure out his life. While this coming-of-age story takes the character longer than most to mature (Mark’s mother would agree), Glassman is worth the wait.

A writer, spoken word artist, and activist, Margaret R. Sáraco taught middle school math for 27 years before publishing her poetry books, If There Is No Wind and Even the Dog Was Quiet with Human Error Publishing. She is a poetry editor for the Platform Review, an online literary journal.