Ilze’s Daughter by Livija Rieksts Bolster

$17.99

 

America has many songs, and in Riki Bolster‘s Ilze’s Daughter, we get to hear a particularly sweet one ─ that of a Latvian family in rural Pennsylvania post World War II.  Bolster’s memory is our guide “as if peering through a scrim,”  her mother, Ilze, the heartbeat of these poems, her “sank you,” a benediction, her piragi (“earthy yeast, warm water, fermentation”) sustaining all as we watch the young poet and her siblings assimilate into their new world after barely escaping Soviet troops. “The dough should fall off your hands,” Ilze says in her kitchen, and in this collection we gain that level of intimacy, another back-story to this country, the one that Whitman says is (like Ilze herself), “a grand, sane, towering Mother.”

–Rupert Fike, author of Hello the House, Lotus Buffet

 

Ilze’s Daughter A Latvian Childhood in Pennsylvania is a triumph. From war-torn Latvia and a displaced persons camp in Germany to the quiet drama of rural Pennsylvania, Riki Bolster‘s poems honor the suffering, humility, and dignity of her family’s immigrant experience. She immortalizes her mother’s domestic work in lines such as these: at day’s end/she has cooked and cleaned/planted and weeded/picked and pickled. Bolster “plants and weeds” language so skillfully that it bears fruit in the reader’s imagination. Imprinting the sepia-toned blur of memory into clear poetic language, these poems achieve a Proustian ideal: through literary art, time is regained, a sense of the eternal returns, and loss is no longer irrevocable.

–Julia Knowlton

 

 

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Ilze’s Daughter

by Livija Rieksts Bolster

Paper

$15.99 List: $17.99

979-8-88838-755-9

2024

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This title will be released on October 11, 2024

Ilze’s Daughter invites you into the intimate world of an immigrant girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania. A memoir in verse, this collection of poems captures experiences of displacement, loss, struggle, first love, family, resilience. Bolster traces her family’s uprooting from WWII occupied Latvia, abandoning her mother’s farm, “Don’t ask me./I really can’t say/ if fear surged up suffocating/ mother so breath came only/in gasps/ as she climbed /onto an overloaded wagon . . .”  The images and vignettes are personal and crack open a door into her world of duality: honoring her Latvian heritage and grieving her mother’s losses, yet discovering a new world of delights,  (“We called them the Rockies/huge boulders as if some god/had scattered them among the trees/just for us to climb and skin our knees.”), the comradeship of six siblings, and falling in love with an American boy.

Born in Greven, Germany in a displaced persons camp, Livija Rieksts Bolster (Riki) emigrated to the United States in 1949. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania as part of a close-knit Latvian immigrant community. Much of her writing speaks to these experiences. Riki taught high school journalism for nineteen years and helped create the Writing Center at Grady High School (now Midtown H. S.). She holds a BA in English from Eastern University and an M. Ed in Special Education from the University of Georgia. Ilze’s Daughter is her first book of poetry.

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