The Family Kitchen by Joan Michelson

The energy and substance of this powerful sequence is derived from our capacity to remember. Michelson shows how “the past falls open anywhere” but, on other occasions, like the branch of a childhood tree grown beyond the adult’s reach, we cannot truly recover the past. There is a Lowellesque quality to The Family Kitchen – parents and relations forensically examined – but elsewhere the present is unreliably visited by the past. Like her own father in ‘Storyteller’, Michelson’s work is equivocally both in and above her personal narrative. Living in time, we record history and the child becomes the parent; living above time, we dream and re-write history, the parent becoming the child. We succumb to fate and contingency or we make ourselves like the woman in ‘Honeymooners’ who “chose to live a different life”. The art of The Family Kitchen avoids flamboyant gestures but these poems are both troubling and reassuring; they are a distillation of our disputes with the past that –  try as we might – we can never lay aside. “Dear Mother”, says ‘A Gift of Going’, “we argue as if you have not gone”.

–Martyn Crucifix, The Lovely Disciplines, Seren Books

The Family Kitchen takes us across generations and continents from Eastern Europe to New England to London. Distant relatives come to vivid life, their stories, passed down, feeding the imagination. This spare but eloquent collection stands out for its telling details, its lyrical vision, and its hard-won generosity of spirit and affection. Poem after poem, while speaking quietly, astounds, moves. This is one family’s saga, particular in its heartbreak, universal in its bounty.

–Andrea Carter Brown, The Disheveled Bed, CavanKerry Press, Ltd.

This poetry understands narrative and knows how to make a quirky character come alive. The last four poems are among the most poignant I’ve read. ‘A Gift of Going’ rightfully dominates the collection, with its unsentimental and unflinching portrait of the poet’s mother’s death.

–Susan Wicks, The Months, Bloodaxe Books