Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid
With nearly 30 books for children and adults to her credit as author, and another half-dozen or so as editor, along with a stately list of major awards and honorary degrees, Giovanni has long been a force for literary exuberance and social responsibility. In her latest accessible, teasing, and poignant collection, she offers straightforward, plain-speaking, sneakily resonant poems, many in prose form. Giovanni remembers her grandparents and the joys of simple pleasures: food, Sunday mornings, driving cross-country. She looks back to her childhood and first literary stirrings, and to her return, as a published poet and mother, to take care of her parents after her father’s stroke. When she describes the labor involved in scraping off layers of old floor wax, she cues us to reflect on how the past shapes and nurtures us even as we must free ourselves from its smothering accretions. Giovanni also reminds us that “Love is a skill;” then, in “When the Girl Becomes a Poet,” she celebrates the opportunity to “be a truth giver / contribute / something beautiful and useful to the world.” --Donna Seaman