Slippery Surfaces - Softcover

Spruijt-Metz, Donna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635348900 ISBN 13: 9781635348903

Publisher: Finishing Line Press, 2019

Synopsis

Slippery Surfaces by Donna Spruijt-Metz takes an unflinching journey into personal history, the lies and truths we tell each other and ourselves. The poems show us the illusiveness of memory, mix lyricism with humor to excavate secrets, and to examine love, death and divinity. What are the stories we tell ourselves to get through, and how do they change with time? How do we stand in the physical world as it crumbles around us? How does love build us and change us? These poems return again and again to our relationships with each other, with parents, children, loved ones, and with God.  

About this title

Review:

With a clarity that is often unnervingly wry, Donna Spruijt-Metz examines a personal history that gets more complex as each poem unfolds, speaking to the incongruities that shadow a life. What our parents tell us, what we tell each other, and what we know about ourselves and each other--Slippery Surfaces deftly brings narrative situation and lyric song into coalescence. Spruijt-Metz's ultimate subject is memory itself, which she movingly describes in its various guises--as lens, as veil, as mirror.

Rick Barot, author of The Darker Fall, Want, and Chord

This is how a story comes to you: out of order, incomplete, and then, sailing through Amsterdam in a streetcar, suddenly you know how your father died and why, in your childhood home, secrets glittered everywhere--why 'there was ice / in crystal tumblers.' Spruijt-Metz spreads its chill over this unflinching collection.

Sarah Manguso, author of 7 books including 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, and Siste Viator

"Daughter and Mother, Amsterdam, Tram 4" alone is worth the cover price of Donna Spruijt-Metz's new collection. This series of conversation poems between a mother and daughter deftly and quietly devastates. In Slippery Surfaces, Spruijt-Metz explores not only the slipperiness and elusiveness of the self but of the narratives we carry with us, from childhood to adulthood, from daughterhood to motherhood. These are poems that know and teach, poems that begin in observation but move inward, poems that help us feel more human.

Maggie Smith, author of 5 books including Good Bones and The Well Speaks of its Own Poison

About the Author:

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, translator, and Professor of Psychology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her first career was as a professional flutist. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Occulum, Naugatuck River Review, Juked and Poetry Northwest. She lives in Hollywood with her husband, the artist Gershom, and their very handsome Australian Shepherd, Yra. She gets restless.

About this edition

• Publisher: Finishing Line Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1635348900
• ISBN 13: 9781635348903
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 38