The Two Yvonnes: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

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 Wis?awa 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.

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.

Praise for Jessica Greenbaum's Inventing Difficulty:"A sinewy, vividly intelligent humanity gives to this collection its memorable voice. In one sense, Jessica Greenbaum's poems are incisively local--that Brooklyn landscape out of Whitman and Hart Crane. In another sense, however, they tell of the larger sadness and recognitions of our century. They 'design their world through love' and scrupulous observation. A first book by a poet very much to be listened to."--George Steiner

Praise for Jessica Greenbaum's Inventing Difficulty: "I have known and admired Jessica Greenbaum's work for many years. It keeps getting better--also harder to describe, in its entrancing blend of the hard-edged and lyrical, the chatty and tragic, the passionate and wry. Greenbaum is mistress of a recognizably urban but also piercingly individual style. Her poetry is full of brilliant phrases but it also respects ambivalence and loss, the silences between people and things, the heartache inhering in the most loving family. Inventing Difficulty is a welcome debut volume by a wonderful poet."--Rachel Hadas

Next Door 1

Promised Town 3

House Phone 5

Anthology 7

What We Read Then 9

The First, Youngest Men 11

Seven, Seven, Seventy-Seven 12

The Voice of Peace 14

Houston in the Early Eighties 15

Without Measure 17

Stowaway's Ascent 18

One Key 19

Packing Slip 21

A Line from Jimi Hendrix Comes to Mind 22

Early April 23

"This" and "That" 24

When My Daughter Got Sick 25

Beauty's Rearrangements 26

What For is For 28

Before 29

Cosmic Page 30

A Poem for S. 31

Little White Truck 32

Sonnets for the Autobiographical Urban Dweller 33

Baldo's 34

Perfume's Journey 35

Little "the" Rules the World 37

Gardens, Passover 38

Streaming Nancy 39

The Use of Metaphor 42

God 43

The Gold Standard 44

Marriage Made in Brooklyn 45

Gratitude's Anniversary 47

What to Expect 48

My Hands in Winter 49

Firefly 50

One Block from the Navy Yard 51

The Moment We Can't Stay 52

For You Today 53

No Ideas but in Things 54

The Two Yvonnes 56

Dedications 58