Beneath the Blue Umbrella by Karen Marker

Karen L. Marker’s poetry collection, Beneath the Blue Umbrella, gathers a family’s secrets and ghosts into a wildly gorgeous bouquet of whispers and singing and memory punctuated by the shock of grief’s “scream like fighter jets.” Though these poems take us dark places to examine the burdens of mental illness, dementia, and loss dragged heavy through the speaker’s history, we are also, in poem by poem, “always being pulled / into light.” Even Marker’s difficult poems are incandescent as she reminds us, page by glowing page, of how the unlikeliest of things can save us— “a little silver splash of paint,” a “nightingale’s voice / break[ing] open the silence,” and “curtains…clear enough to see through to the trees.”

–Francesca Bell, Marin County Poet Laureate, author of  Bright Stain and What Small Sound

Graphic, harrowing, lyrical. The poems and prose of “Beneath the Blue Umbrella” will haunt any reader, especially those with personal or family histories of mental illness. Five stars–please read, and re-read, over and over.

–Stephen P. Hinshaw, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley; Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco; Author, “Another Kind of Madness: A Journey Through the Stigma and Hope of Mental Illness”

Karen Marker’s tender and haunting poems of loss, secrets, and revelations, swirl with lyricism and deep feeling, like the young girl “almost flying—wearing/ a red velvet dress” and the adult sisters who dance to make a memorial “on the smooth wooden floor surrounded by mirrors/ reflecting ourselves back to each other.” These poems and flash memoir pieces yearn and mourn, dig deep into the past and rise up “like the cypress trees making new trees from knobs/in the grass.” They honor creativity and the life force—in  a beloved mother, a half-sister, and ancestors as well as in historical figures such as Leonora Carrington and Dr. Karl Menninger. In this blazingly beautiful collection, we hear “the sound of all that hides, all that wants to be discovered.”

–Kathleen McClung, author of A Juror Must Fold in on Herself and Temporary Kin, Questions of Buoyancy, Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly, Almost the Rowboat