The Lord Balfour Hotel by Suzanne Jones Weisberg

Suzanne Jones Weisberg takes us on a grand journey of lost innocence and reclaimed glamour with The Lord Balfour Hotel. Cuban beauties, bullfighters, gamblers and gangsters, Latin music and sugar cane slices all dazzle in the balmy shtetl that was the Miami Beach of an earlier era. Along the way we learn how handsome men are like cakes and the shape of her chocolate truffle dreams. While bringing vivid life to every line, Weisberg captures the longing and wonder of her well-spent youth, with poems to be both celebrated and savored.

–Nancy Spiller, author of the novel Entertaining Disasters and memoir Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother’s Recipe Box.

There’s more, much more, than mahjong tables and stuffed marlins and zoot suits in this nostalgic collection. Crime bosses and bullfighters and philosophers and neurotic relatives parade through these pages, and we end up on the shores of the Pacific enjoying the pleasures of ice cream and a modicum of contentment, but always hearing the powerful echoes of jazz and flamenco and artists’ young chatter in rooms that burned down long ago.

–Alex M. Frankel, author of So Many Mouths at the End of All Beauty.

There is something elegant and wise about a premier collection of poems composed late in life.  In language well-seasoned, a reader finds a peppering of weariness, a salting of irony, some nuttiness and bitter humor, all ingredients in aging’s recipe.  The narrator in Suzanne Jones Weisberg‘s debut chapbook, “The Lord Balfour Hotel,” is a kind of “wise guy” little girl who, like Eloise in The Plaza, grows up living in a hotel.  Not just any hotel, but a “good fella” world in Miami Beach, where mobsters and Cuban dictators and their sultry mistresses check in and out.  In Jones Weisberg’s capable hands, her poems soar in mystery, sorrow and loss that accompany long memory.  The strange atonal cry of a pelican haunts her, leaving a sound in her mind like “a clanging of the suitcase room, where vipers go to expire.”  Jones Weisberg’s language surprises. Her images are original and playful:  “Cherries on top red as a diaper rash” … “the stuffed marlin pinned above the front desk smiles at me, as always.”  Her writing is confident and taut.  Her subjects range wide from the dark, possibly fatal allure of chocolate, to a dragon mother to lost love, bizarre hotel guests and the terror of a hurricane.  In one poem she evokes Havana in the early 1950s — a lone cornet in the night, sugary humidity, other little girls peeking out of “sordid … curtains.”  A love lyric resonates with the fact of death. “All we love means nothing without you laughing at the moon beside me,” she writes.  She is so good at titles that the table of contents reads like a poem.  The Lord Balfour Hotel is a wonderful debut, a truffle both sweet and dark, a bright moon over Miami.

–Georgia Jones-Davis, author of Blue Poodle and Night School.