My Father and the Astros by Karen Maceira

Karen Maceira‘s poems are distinguished by their lucid tone, steady eye, an unwavering voice.  But beyond their clarity, they convey a truly benign sensibility.  Not that they paint a rosy view of their world.  To the contrary, Maceira persistently exposes the unspoken but prevailing hardships of a family torn by tragedy–an imprisoned brother as “the absent/penitent”; a younger brother who takes his own life; a grandfather who spreads the “family’s mute disease” by warning his granddaughter not to speak a terrible secret; a father withdrawn into “disappointment poised/ and regal”; and behind them all, a grieving mother, who buries her sorrow in noisy housework that, like a  long spoon banging against a gumbo pot, swells “like song.”  It is rare enough for a poet to give an unflinching view of the flawed men she’s known without bitterness; moreover, the poems in My Father and the Astros manage to honor such men, revealing Maceira’s strong feminism.  “Something deeper/ than mind/ remembers childhood, “she writes, but these austere, moving poems “cull the quiet blessing/ of broken light” to offer us “a heart to comfort hope.”

–John Gery, author of Have at You Now!

Karen Maceira‘s My Father and the Astros is a powerful, beautifully crafted collection.  These poems give testimony to the poet’s deepest emotions as her innocence is stripped away by the tragedies that befall her family.  Yet there is beauty and love in her childhood memories written with grace and elegance.  I loved the collection, its tenderness and its honesty.  It is a remarkable collection written by a poet of immense talent.

–Bev Marshall, author of 2018 memoir Back Home: a Vietnam Veteran’s Short Memoir about a Long War.  

In Karen Maceira‘s stunning collection My Father and the Astros, the speaker’s keen eye has been honed by a childhood of silent observation:  “Now I see how I always watched/ from the highest step,” she says, recalling the abuse, addiction, and suicide that shattered her family.  Maceira’s powerful poetry illuminates this catalogue of losses by embracing difficult questions such as “For which sin do you ask/absolution, forgiving yourself over and over?” and “What work/ in my eleven-year-old brain/ kept me from running/ out of that house…?”  Accepting Rainer Maria Rilke’s challenge to “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” Maceira ultimately, admirably creates a gorgeous portrait of survival and resilience.  By the end, the speaker recognizes that “in a family of stricken men” she has become “one of our women, who persevere.”

–Jennifer Richter, author of No Acute Distress