Lake Effect

by Sara Quinn Rivara

Ever marry the wrong man? There’s a fury loose in these poems, seething, a woman trapped: “blinds shut, the world and all its space, denied.” Like her presiding spirit, Persephone, Rivara brings eloquent life to that dead zone, auguring eventual escape, with a musician’s schooled and pitch-perfect ear, a sensual feel and exact eye for nature, language honed to the finest edge: “lakes’s raw lace-edge, cuttooth moon, loons/knife beneath foam: spring, unsheathing."
~ Eleanor Wilner
The poems in Sara Quinn Rivara’s Lake Effect enact a high-stakes “beautiful mess” of a life. The Michigan she conjures is a site of myth renewed by the deeply-witnessed world, where logs are “blistered with frogs” and “the grasses undo from the sky’s blue loom.” Her lines are Whitman-wide, her ferocity Plathian in the dizzying blade of its diction: “Your body…befuddles the thrush, baffles the moon. Is a sugar-tit of reassurance.” The lush beauty and opulent music of Rivara’s lines serves the subversive intent of all great poetry—to recoup one’s life from the forces of erasure, so that “what I hold in my hands I own.”
~ Diane Seuss, author of Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry

Genres: Poetry

40 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 2013

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sara Quinn Rivara writes with long, narrative lines rich in metaphor. The poems, while focusing on the breakages in one’s life, are detailed with plants and lake imagery-- landscape. The collection as a whole feels more like prose than poems and that makes the book very re-readable. I very much recommend this short, but effective book.

“In this new life is there a man who calls me lovely
and do I care? Little blue flame, gundamp twilight, lift
me into evenings last air: cadenza me against the credenza,
carve the rules upon my hair. Cicadas whine. I left the place

where nothing was fine…”