Talking Back by Rebecca L’Bahy

In Rebecca L’Bahy’s capable hands, interrogating domesticity and “talking back” to its critics proves to be a delightful poetic enterprise. With memorable detail and accomplished diction and  syntax, L’Bahy explores the emotionally complex business of parenting-while-working, of being the child of an aging parent as well as the parent of a young child, of vividly recalling her past as she lives dynamically in the present. The art of making poetry and the business of daily life complement and inform one another in this captivating collection. I couldn’t put it down.

–Martha Collins

Talking Back marks the debut of a poet whose intensely wry, probing, and fearless work registers every nuance on the spectrum between rage and praise. In one poem, the rooster on the cornflakes box stares at her “from his one eye / like he wishes he could fly / off his cardboard world to someplace good.” In another, as she orders a tuna sandwich, she envisions the death of the fish, the men “stabbing with picks, going for the eyes, / stabbing the eyes behind my eyes.” Passionately diagnostic, rich in sonic and imaginative verve, attentive both to life’s gravities and its graces, these are poems that know in a world so desperate for saving even a simple, humble poem needs to become “a hero, / to hunt down the most powerful image.” Rebecca Lbahy’s poems never fail in that pursuit.

–Daniel Tobin

Rebecca L’Bahy’s poems are like a very good dark rye: welcoming, solid, made of real ingredients, nutritious.  She writes out of her life as a suburban mother, a working woman, a Jew, a family member, someone engaged with the world around her.  I can’t think of better poems about commuting and her poems about mothering are honest and moving.

Jan 2021

–Marge Piercy