Test Tube with a View by Shira Richman

Test Tube with a View, by Shira Richman and published by Finishing Line Press, explores the odd results that a spirit of setting out into the wilds begets. In these poems, adventure is evaluated through imaginative music and metaphor, showing the process of getting lost from new vantage points—each with a spectacular view.

Test Tube with a View is a treasure. Richman writes spare poems that feel miraculously full, brimming with a fresh effusive spirit. I admire the elegance of the language here and the luminosity of the physical world. These poems teeter between the everyday and the metaphysical, often replicating that state of being in which “lost” seems a natural human condition, as it may well be.

–Nance Van Winckel, author of Pacific Walkers and Book of No Ledge

Blaise Pascal called man “a thinking reed,” but in the case of Shira Richman, it might be more accurate to refer to the “she” of Test Tube with a View as a sentient strand of seaweed in a world in which “There is a shore in every direction.” For Richman, grit is actual grit: the test tube’s sediment and deposits, the dare-devil ablutions of an alter ego who “jumped the cliff, was slapped/ across the soles of her feet by a lake’s face…” This is a collection notable for its alluvial imagination, and these poems are an invitation to shake the test tube, stir up the sediment, and run the silt of routine through our fingers. That done, nothing can stop us. We could try out for the “cloud olympics” or, like the part-time priest, decipher “the job description written by God/ in a negative space contrail script.”Test Tube with a View is an ode to what arrests and releases us.

–Deborah Woodard, author of Borrowed Tales