First Mud by Jane Attanucci

Jane Attanucci‘s First Mud holds the richness and poignance of memory, of a cherished family’s store of love and grief, from Galway’s shores to crooners and “forbidden cigarettes” and Manhattans: the stuff of life. Although another poet tells her that “the poems are writing you,” Attanucci is the gifted creator of the alchemy that writes these moving lyric poems.
–Gail Mazur, author of Figures in a Landscape and Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

These startling and swift poems are origin stories told by a poet who understands the bittersweet truth of adult life, a woman who dares to stand at the unsteady border between her mother and her own motherhood. Jane Attanucci speaks in simple, steel-strong sentences. All artifice scraped away, she masterfully evokes America’s muscular mid-century cities and “the ordinary austerities” of a big and sometimes brutal Irish-Catholic family. And as winter yields to spring, so newborn joy breaks through First Mud, sometimes bursting like a peony or erupting in contagious laughter at the dinner table, but often surreptitious as a hummingbird, elusive as an unseen child ringing bells on a row of locked-up bikes.
–Michael Downing, author of Perfect Agreement and The Chapel

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]