Lineage by Karen Betz Mastracchio

My friend Karen is a thinking poet who carries her readers in her pocket. In her poem, “Marge and Adie,” she illuminates the odd pressings love often takes when parents/grandparents conform to social norms and traditions that may seem to children and grandchildren as strict. She writes this so well in the last two lines:

“Their love was silent,

steeped in the smell of church pews.”

She blends a pseudo-witchcraft adoration of goddesses with sentimental remembrances of “two old maid great-aunts” in the poem “Goddesses.” There are recurring themes of family and fragility in her poems that make Lineage an enjoyable Sunday-afternoon read.

–Terry Jude Miller,  former 1st Vice Chancellor, National Federation of State Poetry Societies

In Lineage, Karen Mastracchio pays and gives intimate attention to the paradoxes and ironies of familial love. Mastracchio knows, “Relationships are complex, twisted and twined through our lives, sometimes the strands breaking” (“Drawing the Lines”). But, even if it’s silent or complicated, Mastracchio shows that love abides. Mastracchio knows “it takes a lifetime to recognize truth and beauty” (“Goddesses), and she shows us how—like the strength of mothers’ hardworking hands, whether “tending lettuces,” (“My Grandmother’s Hands”), typing “on an old Underwood typewriter,” (My Mother’s Hands”), or braiding her own granddaughters’ hair (“Hair”). Lineage is an homage and an investigation into the mystery of family, into the “lineage of joy and pain” that culminates in the miracle of a body. Mastracchio carefully illuminates the “filaments that connect the generations” (“Watching Dad”) even though there is “tension always in that line” (“Tethered—”). Mastracchio shares the blessing of hindsight and the lessons we learn from generations past and those who come after us in this tender and candid collection.

–Courtney O’Banion Smith, Author of In Fidelity, 2022 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Prize winner