Family Business by Paula Sergi

From the review at THE MIDDLEWESTERNER by Tom Montag:

There are some who might call Sergi’s work “clunky middlewestern poetry,” but we should take that to mean these twenty-six poems in FAMILY BUSINESS are about something, about something beyond their own mere existence. The world the poems re-create is a shared world, common as mud, and as accessible as a dirty rug. FAMILY BUSINESS is just that – family business. The business of memory. The art of picking up a piece of remembered life and examining it. Of asking “What does this mean for me? What does it mean for the rest of humankind?” There is a danger of solipsism inherent in the play part of playing with words; and another danger of solipsism in the particular part of life’s sweet particulars. Sergi avoids both. Her poems are about life as the most clunky of us middlewesterners know it; and her investigation of the meaning of life’s particulars is accessible to the rest of us.

Sergi’s mother looms large in these poems, a kind of heroic figure as her daughter makes her and re-makes her in these lines out of memory. Sergi also makes and re-makes the sadnesses of the past, especially the absence of her father, which absence is a presence felt throughout the book. He died of heart failure when Sergi was a girl. She is still looking for him.

Life is too important for us to end up playing word games with it. Life is more family re-union than word puzzle. Sergi’s poems are not games that have been played with life; rather they are the best chunks of meaning she has been able to chisel from memory and from memory’s blind sister, language.