Mosaicq by Kitty Jospé

Kitty Jospé’s 27 jewel-like poems in Mosaicq (Finishing Line Press) are small pieces of a larger picture that assembles gradually with reading. Think of Byzantine mosaics’ storytelling tile by brilliant tile, and you’ll understand the painstaking artistry animating Jospe’s arrangements. The poems in Mosasicq are divided into four groupings—“Tiles Over Time,” “Piecing Faces,” “Mother Remains,” and “Choosing Tesserae.” Her titles suggest how Jospé composes as she ventures into the treacherous maze of family history and comes back out again. In “Along the Silk Road—Cleave Poem,” a father’s severance from his son shows visually: the poem splits in two halves that can be read horizontally or vertically.

In “Nursing Home” the narrator comforts a fragile, mentally unbalanced woman, holding her gently and tightly, murmuring, “This is me. This is you.” The simplest possible pair of sentences affirms the relation and the separation also, like the two sides of the mobius strip going round and round but never touching in “Almost then not any more.” In that brilliant poem, “another phone call, / and we start our mobius strip of talk…”

Jospe’s mixes levity with somberness, often within poems, and multiple perspectives abound, from “Janus Slipping on His Other Face” to “What Flies” with opposing moral laws to a meditation on the Mona Lisa’s famously enigmatic smile, a word which conflates in French with mouse, and gives Jospé an occasion for cross-language wordplay.

One senses that great pain with discipline drives the making of these poems, moving from “Thousands of raw hours we have written” to “We use our letters like bait to catch pieces of ourselves” to achieve this final tender ascension: “signing oceans with mermaid tails.”
–Bart White, Foreign Language Teacher, Poet

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]