A Mobius Path by Jean Fineberg

What elegant, ruminative poems these are, calling up memories—of lost loves, lost mothers, lost cities—with a clear-eyed wonder that leaves the reader frequently breathless. Whether it is the melancholic nostalgia of “We Never Made it to London”, the formal inventiveness of “Light Blue”, or the lyric playfulness of “Ode to My Ballpoint Pen”, Jean Fineberg’s debut collection reminds us that joy is a sibling to grace, and memory a mother to wisdom.

—Kareem Tayyar, author of The Prince of Orange County and Immigrant Songs

In her poem, “The Cha Cha Walk, the speaker asks her aging mother, “Do you know who I am?” Her mother responds, “Someone who loves me.” It’s clear that the speaker in these poems loves her mother deeply, just as she loves the world in all its complexity. With a companionable voice as confident as it is vulnerable, the speaker catalogs her life and emerges as an expert, both in observing the world as it exists in real time, and as the keeper of a world that others are beginning to forget. Her memories spark with color and texture as she shows us all the different ways love has informed her – love across generations, love that has burned through its fuel, love between humans and animals, and love that has lost a part of its memory. The speaker holds all of it, and gifts it to her lucky readers in these sharp, shining poems that remind us that sometimes the best way to explain who you are is to say who and what you have loved.

–Gretchen Marquette, author of May Day