Affairs Run In The Family by Lee Varon

$13.99

 

Lee Varon‘s poems take us to the 1936 shooting of her grandfather who was having an affair, to her grandmother who cared for him despite his indiscretion.  It is poetry about pride, strength, family, and loyalty.  The images like “my grandmother’s brittleness breaking into fine kindling” are breathtaking. The prejudice in the community is jaw-dropping, yet amazingly relevant to today’s issues.  Dynamic moving poetry at its best.

–Jean Flanagan, author of Black Lightning

 

The poems in Lee Varon‘s Affairs treat the relationships of the author and her troubled Southern white family with memorable panache and a haunted poignancy. The author’s inimitable grandmother, the focus of the drama, describes her own family as “too poor to paint // and too proud to whitewash.” Varon circumscribes the world of Grandmother’s genteel bigotry—and her own pushback against it—in poems that stir amusement and indignation. Beautifully crafted, they negotiate their way through a panoply of infidelities, Confederate ghosts, firebombed Freedom Riders, and watering cans in Virginia graveyards. The poems are lit as if with the winking luminosity of fireflies—at once discreet, charmed, and indelibly coruscating.

–Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach

 

 

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Affairs Run In The Family

by Lee Varon

$13.99, paper

Lee Varon is a social worker in the Boston area. She was born in Chicago and grew up in Illinois. As a child she spent summers with her maternal grandmother in Petersburg, Virginia. Many of the poems in this volume refer to the 1936 shooting of her grandfather by the husband of his lover.

Her poetry has been nominated for a pushcart prize. In addition to poetry she writes prose and won the 2015 Briar Cliff Review Fiction Award. She has written several books on adoption. Her poetry has been published in various journals including Atlanta Review, Ibbetson Street, The Somerville Times, Muddy River Poetry Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Oddball Magazine.

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