Nice and Loud by Lois Rosen, reviewed by Susan Clayton Goldner

Nice and Loud by Lois Rosen
Tebot Bach, 2015, $16.00
Reviewed by Susan Clayton Goldner

Nice and Loud, a collection of beautifully crafted poetry by Lois Rosen, is authentic and yet tender. It is intimate, unselfconscious and introspective. Her story takes the reader into the world of a young Jewish girl growing up in a cramped, Yonkers apartment after World War II. In the poet’s own words:

Forever is how long our family will be stuck in that fourth-floor walkup.

Nice and Loud is inhabited by colorful and real characters. One of the most powerful is the writer’s father. He has cancer – a death sentence hovering over him, all the days of her childhood: . . .that bomb of my father’s possible relapse. Rosen paints her father in a way that balances the hard and the soft, and the reader finds him utterly endearing. But the dreaded cancer didn’t kill him:

One night he slipped into a diabetic coma/ the next day he was dead.

In one of my favorite poems, “Provider,” her father promises, You will be well provided for.

In the final stanza, Rosen says:

After the funeral we found bank books, bonds,
those dollars, we flipped through like cards,
screamed, clapped, giggled like hell,
our blouses soaked with tears.

 The author writes about an uncle who comes home whole from the war, in her poem “After the War”

He’d fought in France where Lanvin
created Arpege, Rumeur and My Sin,
where Bartholdi and Eiffel
designed Liberty, the statue
our family watched for a nickel
from the Staten Island Ferry,
my father holding my hand
where the ocean smell, gulls
and the view of Manhattan
belonged to us no matter
who we were.

In this collection, Lois Rosen takes us to the profound place where language and emotion merge. The work is sometimes humorous, but always honest and hopeful. Read the book from start to finish and take this important journey with her. You will be far richer for the experience. Rosen’s first collection of poetry, Pigeons, was published in 2004 by Traprock Books of Eugene.

 

Reviewer bio:

Susan Clayton-Goldner’s poetry has appeared in literary journals and anthologies including Animals as Teachers and Healers, published by Ballantine Books, Our Mothers/Ourselves, The Hawaii Pacific Review-Best of a Decade, and New Millennium Writings. She is the author of a collection of poetry entitled, A Question of Mortality.

 

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