Book Review: Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet by Michael Mark (Rattle, 2022).

and she spoke a strange language and / left and came back without a son and / left and came back and never came back from “Portrait in Alzheimer’s Disease” (15)

Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet won the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize, a prestigious annual contest attracting several thousand entries, out of which only three manuscripts were selected for publication. In addition to a copy being mailed to each of more than eight thousand Rattle subscribers (an enormous print run for any writer’s first book of poetry), Michael Mark’s chapbook earned the distinction of becoming the journal’s all-time best seller online, according to Rattle editor Timothy Green. “We also had many subscribers ordering extra copies for friends and family,” Green said, “I think it's both because Michael is a brilliant poet of empathy, and also because so many people are going through the experience of helping their parents through the end right now.”

The book’s front cover photo, overlaid by one of the longest titles in literary history, is of a woman nearing her nineties sipping coffee by a window through which nothing is visible, in a room with a faded decor that passed from modest fashionability at least fifty years ago. This woman’s name is Estelle, and we don’t know it yet, but soon, regardless of warts, frustrations, and tragedies, we’ll learn to value, mourn, and cherish her as if she were our own mother, our own grandmother. Turn the book over, here’s Estelle’s sixty-something son, the poet Michael Mark, standing in the same space, now emptied. The stories and the emotional resonance of these two images, connected on a single sheet of 9” x 12” cardstock, separated by time and death, is a bonus visual poem: a sonnet expressed in photographs.

As to the finely-crafted free verse poems, here are two dozen absorbing family photos brought to life: as if they were scenes from a play we’re watching from the wings of an intimate theatre, as if they were conversations we’re overhearing through the thin walls of our adjoining apartment, as if we’ve been invited inside to sit on a worn, sagging brown couch. Michael Mark’s book is an unflinchingly honest, devastating, and celebratory exploration of the poet’s relationship with his parents, of shifting family dynamics during the Alzheimer’s disease afflicted final years of his mother’s life, and of his relationship with a now ninety-seven-year-old cantankerously persevering father.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, a progressive memory and cognitive function disorder that currently afflicts at least six million Americans, mostly sixty-five and older. Most families know, or will eventually know, the sadness and trauma of experiencing the essence of a loved one slipping away: a grandparent, a parent, a spouse. In my mid-sixties, and at least partially aware of how many steps I’ve lost when it comes to memory, concentration, and the ability to think, the specter of Alzheimer’s terrifies me. An accumulating joy and comfort of this book is witnessing the adult child’s acceptance of his mother as her disease transforms her into … not the same mother he’s known, exactly … but a person still worthy of respect and love.

Mark is a poet of observation. “What did you eat today, Mom? / She says tuna. // the correct answer is crust from a lemon / pound cake she shredded with her chewed fingers / then puzzled together.” (“Sparrow,” 11). A compelling specificity might be the only legitimate path to expression of the universal: a proposition well-proven in Mark’s poems. One of many examples, from “Losing My Parents in a Small CVS Drug Store” (18): “The stock boy caught them in the Employees Only restroom, admiring / the hand soap and the bathroom spray, Hawaiian Calm.”

In “Spoiled” (27), Mark enacts the protective stoicism of precise numbers, employing a stanza of end-stopped lines in a poem otherwise liberal with enjambments (some jarring us into disassociation):

I do the math: she has been gone exactly seventy-three hours.

The stamp on the carton warns the milk expired five days ago.

The pulmonologist alerted me it was a matter of hours.

They were married two months shy of sixty-five years.

Along the book’s path, we encounter many opportunities for smiles, for surprises of outright laughter. From “She Fools Me Every Time” (22):

When she soils herself and asks

if she smells, I take a big whiff, say, No.

Do I?

From “Nothing’s as Hard as We Make It” (28):

Get out from under my feet, I tell her—

like she’d told me countless times. Go

have fun with the other dead moms.

Open the book to the middle: here’s another visual poem, facing page photographs of Estelle and Bob caught in a moment of shared joy at some point during their seventh decade of marriage. From “Estelle and Bob” (29):

My father kneels at my mother’s grave

to ask her permission to go on match.com.

In our mundane “real world,” a world we leave behind while living in the enhanced and often truer reality of a Michael Mark poem, it’s 99.999% certain that ninety-something Bob never printed out pages of dating site profiles to read aloud to his recently deceased wife. Bob also surely didn’t move on via a “meet-cute” parking lot fender-bender as described in “First Date” (31). Mark’s poems strike us as authentic personal history, as family anecdotes flavored, perhaps, with the hyperbolic flourishes we accept (and expect, enjoy, and demand) from our most entertaining storytellers. The scenes he presents can move, at times, from dramedy into pure fantasy. In “Souvenirs” (14), the speaker’s mother is gathering up “freebies” prior to departing a hotel room (and who among us hasn’t slipped a tiny bottle of shampoo into a bag to take home?). Along with the box of tissues, the hangers, and the coffee maker, “She takes the Atlantic Ocean, folds / it over several times to fit // into my suitcase.” On some level, this miracle becomes believable. Years prior to her physical passing from mortality, Estelle has already ascended into the realm of myth. No reasonable person doubts the abilities of the gods, just as no child doubts their parents can do magic. The final stanza of “Estelle and Bob” also didn’t happen. At the same time, it absolutely did happen and I’ll fight anyone saying otherwise:

He pulls some short weeds, places three pebbles

on the craggy head of the stone, and sings

Happy Birthday, raising his voice at her name,

so everyone knows he’s with her.

Approaching the book’s end, here’s one more poem-via-photograph to savor: two spoons, the left hand one slightly smaller and somewhat differently shaped than the right, both scratched and pitted from decades of daily meals and washings. The handle of the left-hand spoon is engraved with the corporate font of HORN & HARDART CO., a food services company that opened its first New York City automat restaurant in 1912. Becoming very popular during the Great Depression, the chain (featuring pre-prepared foods behind glass doors opened by the insertion into slots of coins or tokens) began to decline in the 1960’s, its final restaurant closing in 1991. The handle of the right-hand spoon is even more specific how this cutlery entered a lifetime of service in Estelle and Bob’s apartment: PROPERTY OF HORN & HARDART CO.

“A Daily Practice” (39), the book’s final poem, is somewhat of a departure. Estelle and Bob aren't present, but their spirits shine through in lessons their son learned through participating in their lives. The poem’s speaker writes the word Temporary on red, yellow, and green sticky notes, pressing them first onto “socks, silverware, bills, my hair,” then on the maple trees in his yard, on his car, on his house, on fear, on hate. This poem is notably informed by Michael Mark’s years as a hospice volunteer, and by a Buddhist practice begun in middle-age (present even in the book’s title). Wisdom brings the realization that nothing is permanent, not our relationships with the people we love, not even the sticky notes or the word Temporary. “... sometimes a wind / comes. And I stumble around, trying to catch them.”

A reviewer’s eternal limitation is that no description, analysis, or critique of any tangible artistic creation can measure up to the thing itself: sculpture, painting, song, movie, poem. I’ll type out page 35 of Michael Mark’s chapbook and let it speak to you what it is, let it tell you what it sees: on its own terms, in its own beauty, and with its own strength.

Celebrating His 92nd Birthday

the Year His Wife Dies

He goes to Ben’s Deli

because the waitress doesn’t ask how he is.

He takes most of the corned beef

from the sandwich, piles

it on the edge of the plate, makes

a thinner one, with enough left for two

nice ones at home.

The waitress packs his leftovers, extra

slices of rye and half sour pickles

in wax paper and two mustards in squat cups.

She never removes the other setting.

She lets him sit as long as he wants.

To enjoy more of Michael Mark’s poetry, visit michaeljmark.com. Copies of Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet may also be purchased there through a link to rattle.com.