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Dresses from the Old Country (American Poets Continuum
In Laura Read’s second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mother—a woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Read’s poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing “dresses from the old country.”
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 9, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 28, 2021
Wish I was a great woman with something important to say; I'll just keep reading them instead.
March 15, 2020
Beyond the familiarity of reading about someone who grew up near me, near when I did, this book is beautiful and the metaphors enlivening.
August 7, 2019
I’m very glad I read these poems. These poems, more than most I read, talk of an ordinary life, through an extraordinary lens. What she sees, in her classroom, in her home, in the world…is something deeper and bigger. It’s beautiful. And it’s captured powerfully and well.
November 6, 2023
Poetry readings are a pain in the behind. See how long you last on metal folding chairs. Promising students' eyes bright with glowing adoration, encourage inside jokes and TMI. The "street" person cast out of a bookstore into the quickly chilling night sits behind her eating his dinner, sorting a cardboard collection, adjusting a rumpled sock, his back pressed to the picture window that separates him from her words. Common ceiling to a gamers store and intrusive but indecipherable chatter from the charcuterie shop make formidable competition with the PA system.
It all seems so unfair.
Unfair because good poems need to be read slowly, often more than once, and these are pretty good.
If you are of a certain age, probably female, and particularly familiar with the Inland Northwest (or would like to be), Laura Reed will have something to share. Something akin to the snow cookies hidden in mother's "underwear" drawer a little salty, a little sweet, and better if it's a swooshy slop bucket rainstorm night. Better if your toes are a bit chilled from shuffling through cast off pine needles along the Centennial trail or maybe you've run out of books you picked up at that special place in Metaline Falls where you give more than requested for less than you were offered.
You have to grow up wearing down the grooves in your mother's South Pacific album.
It helps if you have packed away a tiny bitterness left over towards someone who did something crummy to part of you that was released into the wild.
Best if you get the book, signed or unsigned, and take it away for later, like the Halloween candy you didn't eat while the other kids were gorging themselves.
If you do, don't include it in the Good Reads challenge you put off until the weather turned wintery again. You need some time.
Gift with purchase, a list of 167 other collections from BOA editions. Also, 3 names on the back cover to Google. One of them has to have written something you missed.
It all seems so unfair.
Unfair because good poems need to be read slowly, often more than once, and these are pretty good.
If you are of a certain age, probably female, and particularly familiar with the Inland Northwest (or would like to be), Laura Reed will have something to share. Something akin to the snow cookies hidden in mother's "underwear" drawer a little salty, a little sweet, and better if it's a swooshy slop bucket rainstorm night. Better if your toes are a bit chilled from shuffling through cast off pine needles along the Centennial trail or maybe you've run out of books you picked up at that special place in Metaline Falls where you give more than requested for less than you were offered.
You have to grow up wearing down the grooves in your mother's South Pacific album.
It helps if you have packed away a tiny bitterness left over towards someone who did something crummy to part of you that was released into the wild.
Best if you get the book, signed or unsigned, and take it away for later, like the Halloween candy you didn't eat while the other kids were gorging themselves.
If you do, don't include it in the Good Reads challenge you put off until the weather turned wintery again. You need some time.
Gift with purchase, a list of 167 other collections from BOA editions. Also, 3 names on the back cover to Google. One of them has to have written something you missed.
December 24, 2021
Once again I'm impressed with what's going on in the poetry scene out there in Spokane. Must be something in the water coming over the Spokane Falls...
This slim volume of verse pulses with life, as Laura Read bravely chronicles the high and the low moments of a passionate existence. Poems like "Mary's Waking Dream" (concerning Mary Shelley and the genesis of Frankenstein) reflect on the creative process itself, and the careful examination of this theme is one of the highlights of Dresses from the Old Country.
Perhaps the very best poem in that vein (and in the book as a whole) is the introduction, "In Praise of Shadows", which captures the spirit that animates the rest of Read's excellent volume:
Junichirō Tanizaki says the Japanese
love shadows, their lights low
when they eat, their silverware tarnished.
Tanizaki asks, Why so much shine?
He wants to raise the lacquered bowl
to his lips and stare into its darkness,
a lake you can slip inside,
your body glowing like the moon
casting its own shadow on the surface,
larger, smudged, a moon
that's been crying, its face puffy and soft.
This slim volume of verse pulses with life, as Laura Read bravely chronicles the high and the low moments of a passionate existence. Poems like "Mary's Waking Dream" (concerning Mary Shelley and the genesis of Frankenstein) reflect on the creative process itself, and the careful examination of this theme is one of the highlights of Dresses from the Old Country.
Perhaps the very best poem in that vein (and in the book as a whole) is the introduction, "In Praise of Shadows", which captures the spirit that animates the rest of Read's excellent volume:
Junichirō Tanizaki says the Japanese
love shadows, their lights low
when they eat, their silverware tarnished.
Tanizaki asks, Why so much shine?
He wants to raise the lacquered bowl
to his lips and stare into its darkness,
a lake you can slip inside,
your body glowing like the moon
casting its own shadow on the surface,
larger, smudged, a moon
that's been crying, its face puffy and soft.
August 12, 2025
Was shocked and happy to see she is from the bay.
Laura Read is incredible, and this is absolutely worth a read. Some of her words genuinely crushed me, and the way she makes language feel like her own makes this a fruitful experience regardless of what else you take from it.
4/5 because I felt as though sometimes there was a drag, or prolonging of points in each poem that would’ve struck me much harder if there wasn’t the extra fluff. This is embarrassing to say because I think she is a genius and I could never in my life write to the level and ability she writes at. There were just moments where I could fully see, feel, and live in her grief and revelations with her, and then the poems would feel like a complete pivot from the idea I assumed they were setting up.
She is a genius, I wish she had more books because I’d read more. There is so much to quote from her, which is more important to me than anything in poetry, I cried multiple times reading this which I also think makes this inherently fantastic poetry
Laura Read is incredible, and this is absolutely worth a read. Some of her words genuinely crushed me, and the way she makes language feel like her own makes this a fruitful experience regardless of what else you take from it.
4/5 because I felt as though sometimes there was a drag, or prolonging of points in each poem that would’ve struck me much harder if there wasn’t the extra fluff. This is embarrassing to say because I think she is a genius and I could never in my life write to the level and ability she writes at. There were just moments where I could fully see, feel, and live in her grief and revelations with her, and then the poems would feel like a complete pivot from the idea I assumed they were setting up.
She is a genius, I wish she had more books because I’d read more. There is so much to quote from her, which is more important to me than anything in poetry, I cried multiple times reading this which I also think makes this inherently fantastic poetry
December 13, 2018
Wicked, sharp.
February 15, 2024
"and all I want to do is drive, the radio a river / of summers, everything I've lost / flashing in its current."
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews