This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker Jessica Greenbaum s narrative poems in which objects and metaphor share highest honors attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday Written in plain American that cats and dogs can read as Marianne Moore phrased it these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wislawa Szymborska the reportage of Yehuda Amichai and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker The book asks at heart how does life present itself to us and how do we create value from our delights and losses Riding on Kenneth Koch s instruction to find one true feeling and hang on The Two Yvonnes overtakes the present with candor meditation and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force Moving from 1960s Long Island to 1980s Houston to today s Brooklyn the poems range in subject from the pages of the Talmud to a squirrel trapped in a kitchen One tells the story of young lovers warmed by the rays Their pelvic bones sent over the horizon of their belts while another describes the Bronx Zoo in winter where the giraffes pad about like nurses walking quietly outside a sick room Another poem defines the speaker via a packing slip of her parts brown eyes brown hair from hirsute tribes in Poland and Russia The title poem in which the speaker and friends stumble through a series of flawed memories about each other unearths the human vulnerabilities that shape so much of the collection ______ From The Two Yvonnes WHEN MY DAUGHTER GOT SICK Jessica Greenbaum Her cries impersonated all the world The fountain s bubbling speech was just a trickBut still I turned and looked as she implored Or leaned toward muffled noises through the bricks Just radio whose waves might be her wav ering whose pitch might be her quavering I turned toward where the sirens might be Save Me Help me Mommy Mommy everythingShe too had said since sloughing off the world She took to bed and now her voice stays fusedTo air like outlines of a bygone girl The streets the lake the room just places bruisedWithout her form the way your sheets still holdRough echoes of the risen sleeper cold

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