The Shadow of a Dog I Can't Forget

by Mary Kennedy Eastham

Are you ready to be seduced? Mary Kennedy Eastham's poetry and prose has been called darkly beautiful, erotic, lyrical and haunting. One reviewer said sitting down with her poems blew his hair back flat reminding him of when he was in high school, laying in the grass at the end of the runway as the jets took off. In the title poem, 'The Shadow of a Dog I Can't Forget' a woman, married for only sixty days, deals with feelings of melancholy by inventing a mysterious dog only she can see. In this carefully crafted world of runaways, mystical goddesses, happy strippers and Marilyn Monroe returned to us to comment on her life being auctioned away, the poet's words nag at us the way only a great seduction can.like liquid pearls falling from the sky above/as soft and easy as a fortune teller's dreams/We are beautiful alone with ourselves/they seem to say/evening snowflakes floating/beneath a faint moon/like fingertips about to touch/a new piano/each sound, each song/a miracle.

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 13, 2007