Tick-Tock by Peggy Schimmelman

“Somehow it happens: a line or a phrase/another, then another,” the poems in Peggy Schimmelman’ s new collection “Tick-Tock” impel the reader through its pages. But just when you think these poems are reflections on the passage of time as her title implies, they catch you by surprise. The vignettes – a spat with a neighbor, a chat with her long-dead mother, a trip to the thrift store – provide glimpses of fragile and complicated relationships. And beyond that, how we faithless lovers are beating up our precious Mother Earth. We might be soothed by the music of the poetry – “stars slipping out/of cozy constellations/like teenage daughters,” “waiting for the sound of stilettos on the stairs,” “the weight of our failure was stifling that day” –but Schimmelman’s vivid no-nonsense sass keeps grabbing us by the soul and bringing us back to full attention. This is a work of layers upon layers of heartbreak and grit.

–Cher Wollard, Poet Laureate of Livermore, CA, 2009-2013, author of The Magician’s Wife and In My Other Life

Although some are granted too little, and some perhaps too much, none of us can escape the fact that time is finite. In Tick-Tock, Peggy Schimmelman tackles this truth with wit and intelligence, exploring universal fears, regrets, joys, and sorrows. Her moving poems examine time through a multitude of perspectives: disease and divorce, disasters and demons, loneliness and love. Join her as she “tumbles through time” with procrastinators, insomniacs, mothers, musicians, and more. 

–Cynthia J. Patton, author of Across An Aqueous Moon: Travels in Autism and Poet Laureate of Livermore, CA (2017-2021). 

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