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Watching from the Bleachers by Eileen Ivey Sirota

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“Watching from the Bleachers is a compelling book, filled with compassion and insight. Sirota demonstrates her impressive range with an ode to the em-dash, and her series of ekphrastic poems. She shows her empathy with powerful poems on the effects of pandemic isolation, the dangers of anti-trans legislation, and the corrosion of American ideals from systemic racism—which turn our history books into ‘fairy tales/for innocents and children.’ This is a highly recommended collection.”

–Kim Roberts, author, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC and Corona/Crown

 

Eileen Ivey Sirota’s new collection, Watching from the Bleachers, is as assured as it is varied. Poems about America’s dysfunction with race, equity, and violence are woven with our collective shock of living with (and hiding from) each other during the pandemic. The smallest, quietest gestures prove the deadliest, such as “the silence” in “Whitewash.” The author leavens the larger themes with the personal—stanzas rife with exquisite detail. “Rinsed Spaghetti” juxtaposes the narrator’s favorite childhood food with a later divorce from a husband who still holds an attraction: “something soft in his eyes, / the tentative tilt of the head.” While the collection prominently features difficult topics, a grudging optimism emerges in unlikely places: “One more time / we put the key in the ignition and listen— / straining to hear a faint, hopeful hum.”

–Dana Cann, author of Ghosts of Bergen County

 

 

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Watching from the Bleachers

by Eileen Ivey Sirota

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$17.99  List: $19.99

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This title will be released on June 28, 2024

Watching from the Bleachers draws us into engagement with the world in all its brokenness and beauty. Eileen Ivey Sirota‘s poems traverse the spectrum from the personal to the political — from the loving ambivalence between a cognitively impaired mother and her adult daughter to outraged examinations of racism, othering and indifference.  In the poem “In Which I Interrogate My Frequent Response” the author’s own privilege becomes the object of her sharp gaze.  Covid and its time-distorting effects are a frequent backdrop to this work.  The poems “Master Class” and “Advice to a Freshman” invite whimsical comparisons between the mating behavior of cicadas and college students. The inevitable losses of aging are captured elegiacally but without sentimentality.  The broad sweep of these poems is held together by a unique sensibility that combines wit, wonder, outrage and, ultimately, hope.

Eileen Ivey Sirota is a psychotherapist, poet, and potter.  Her poems have appeared in Calyx, District Lines, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Voices: Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, NewVerseNews, Ekphrastic Review, Lighten Up Online and elsewhere.  Her first chapbook, Out of Order, was published by Finishing Line Press.  Having been raised in a family of political junkies and activists in the Washington DC area, political and cultural issues infuse her poetry.  She lives in Bethesda, Maryland where she alternates between sputtering outrage and gob smacked wonder. Watching from the Bleachers unites these two tendencies.

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