This Is Still Life

by Tracy Mishkin, Kiki Petrosino (Foreword)

Read Tracy Mishkin’s poems as an antidote to the “meat wheel full of teeth” that is the contemporary news cycle. Not because this dangerously clever collection soothes, or because it provides comfort, but because these lyrics are urgent without shallow or callous bids for the reader’s attention, and instead render the heartbreak of America as gorgeously as an old master’s Vanitas—it’s the beauty of the poems that provides hope, even as the menace of the grinning skull cannot.

This Is Still Life fully invests in the double meaning of the title as it uses the dirty minutia of domestic life to symbolically stand in for our ruin while pointing to how the sunlight gilds the dirt so sweetly, we can’t help but get up again in the morning. “Talk radio, speak / to my heart of all that I have lost,” Mishkin’s speaker prays, and we find ourselves praying, too, while the poems work polish into our hope.

43 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 18, 2018

Reviews

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tracy Mishkin's clear, practical language cuts to the heart of the quotidian to expose the hopelessness of the American dream, a circle of our own particular hell where despair sleeps on a pool table with his head on the eight ball. Hers is an unswerving intelligence that sees in the way her neighbors 'cut their eyes' what it means to be Jewish in a nation where a third of the population believes only Christians are truly American. But she also finds in a drawer of odd socks a 'ray of yes in a world of no.' It is with such small whimsicalities that Mishkin would rouse the pool-table sleeper. Our sense of the absurd may not save our lives, but it may save our souls.