“Two poems from Ruth Thompson’s Crazing”

Review of Crazing on Reiter’s Block.

Jendi Reiter, whom I admire greatly both as a poet (I was honored to write a blurb for Bullies in Love) and an editor (Winning Writers Newsletter), today posted a lovely review of Crazing on her blog, Reiter’s Block.

Jendi included two of the poems from Crazing, including “Mary Speaks,” one of my favorite poems in the book, and one that felt as though a very distinctive and amused voice was speaking to me.

“How easily I vanished from the story,” Mary notes wryly.

And what happened then? “I bundled myself back on the donkey, / unwound the old stars to show the way. // In the dark of the moon I came home.”

Later she says, “These men will have no Mother. No matter. The boy is dead.” Characteristically she includes both an ironic pun (“matter/mater”) and a mother’s pain at the loss of her child.

I speak of her as if she wrote this, not I, and indeed, that’s how it felt. This is the Mary I heard, not the weeping powerless pieta of masculinized Christianity.