Recent Review
Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet.
Great poetry doesn’t need to bring me to my knees in tears, but that was the case with Michael Mark’s debut chapbook Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize. This collection floats somewhere between meditation and memory. There’s a spiritual quality to Mark’s deceptively straightforward verse. These candid poems place me undeniably with Mark’s aging parents, yet at times I’m not sure if I’m in Mark’s meditative imagination, in a synagogue, or in a monastery. I mean this all figuratively, of course, because the reader is without a doubt “in the 40-watt haze of that apartment in Queens.” | full review
— Los Angeles Review
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. | full review
