Perhaps You Can

In Perhaps You Can, Steven Deutsch intimately recalls a Brooklyn long gone. It's not that you can't go home again, "Just don't be surprised / when no one greets you." From a perilous relationship with a troubled brother, to the shadow of a fictitious sister, the speaker in these poems recalls a childhood of grit and mischief and a young adulthood weighted by the irrevocable damage of the Vietnam war. With elegant turns of line and gut-punch endings, these poems evoke a yearning both potent and exquisite. David J. Bauman, author of Angels and Adultery and editor of Word FountainPerhaps You Can by Steven Deutsch contains compelling threads: that of the relationship between brothers, that of war and the past, and underneath it all and presented with unfailing pragmatism, that of magic and luck. That understated sense of the numinous always stood out to me. "When my brother held me upside down all the little lucky things came pebbling out of my pockets," And while in another poem, this magic "never worked," the magic in these poems certainly does. In the final poem, while Deutsch writes that "although the sun may pause and retrace its steps across the sky, I will never return to Brooklyn," I am happy to know that we, as readers, can return as often as we'd like. Jennifer Finstrom, poetry editor of EclecticaIn Perhaps You Can, Steven Deutsch demonstrates that he is a born storyteller. Like the pockets of the boy in "Vietnam, 1968," these poems are full of small treasures: precise details ("my brother wrote a lot that year, on prison-issue stationary"), sonic surprises ("Grandma taught me to keep a kicker ace/ that post position trumped track condition"), and self-deprecating humor. But these poems hold truths with teeth. From tenement steps in Brooklyn to Tokyo, they reveal the failing of family, the guilt of deferment, and love's persistence. This chapbook is a both a love letter and an elegy for what is lost and what can be reclaimed. Katherine Bode-Lang, winner of the American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize for The Reformation