How She Came Here

How She Came Here by Barbara Elovic opens with prophetic lines: "Not the alarm clock but/hope gets you out of bed in the morning," and moves through a childhood where "Henka the phantom cousin joins the dance/of creatures conjured from memory or guilt," and "girls were culled from boys/to guard the Talmud pages." Imelda Marcos declares, "I am opulence." Anne Frank is an adult in a park "where the sun is so strong/we must shade our eyes" and a father is buried in "ground too hard to take him in." Cousins and a rabbi "straining in their suits/and dress shoes, knocking/with their small shovels/on frozen dirt to cover the coffin." Hope binds these distinctly varied stories. It compels the narrative forward in this spellbinding collection that closes with a literal beacon of hope, "the Kentile Floors sign, its neon seen/from the lurching F train," proof of what remains unchanged, appearing when we least expect it.

-Lynn McGee, author of Tracks, Sober Cooking, and Heirloom Bulldog; co-author of Starting Over in Sunset Park

The poems of How She Came Here sing with a subtle music that aches in the knowledge that our hope is always under threat. As one of them says, "How small the space between breathing and not." Elovic relentlessly confronts difficult truths about our history, about the lies we tell ourselves. In meditations, in vignettes, in portraits of historical figures, she illuminates our present in light of our past; she illuminates our identity in light of our strained ties to each other.

-Michael T. Young, author of The Infinite Doctrine of Water and many other books

The poems in Time Out have hard emotional and intellectual work to do:

They propose to repair a frayed link between a daughter and her dying father.

The poems are so accurate and scrupulous that they not only succeed, but

also come to embody some of the blessing they strove so carefully to invoke.

-William Matthews (1942--1997) author of eleven books of poems and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award