Affairs Run In The Family by Lee Varon

Lee Varon‘s poems take us to the 1936 shooting of her grandfather who was having an affair, to her grandmother who cared for him despite his indiscretion.  It is poetry about pride, strength, family, and loyalty.  The images like “my grandmother’s brittleness breaking into fine kindling” are breathtaking. The prejudice in the community is jaw-dropping, yet amazingly relevant to today’s issues.  Dynamic moving poetry at its best.

–Jean Flanagan, author of Black Lightning

The poems in Lee Varon‘s Affairs treat the relationships of the author and her troubled Southern white family with memorable panache and a haunted poignancy. The author’s inimitable grandmother, the focus of the drama, describes her own family as “too poor to paint // and too proud to whitewash.” Varon circumscribes the world of Grandmother’s genteel bigotry—and her own pushback against it—in poems that stir amusement and indignation. Beautifully crafted, they negotiate their way through a panoply of infidelities, Confederate ghosts, firebombed Freedom Riders, and watering cans in Virginia graveyards. The poems are lit as if with the winking luminosity of fireflies—at once discreet, charmed, and indelibly coruscating.

–Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach