The Lovely Mundane by Anita Pulier

The Lovely Mundane is not, as it turns out, mundane—Anita S. Pulier’s work admits of the miraculous. In the poem, “What I Knew,” “a small dead brother” chooses the author’s eighth birthday to rise like a Lazarus of Coney Island through the mysterious and good offices of a fortune-teller. A father who will not acknowledge grief is brought to the harrowing mercy of truth. A child begins to understand complexities of love and silence and family. This extraordinary and moving collection of poems is steeped in family and place—the butcher, Aunt Frieda, Brooklyn College, Riverside Park, the F train, the way two martinis created “a filigreed space on a louvered porch in Queens” in the fifties. Her clear lyric voice begins in daily life, and then takes a turn into another dimension as she charts the flow of the unstoppable, the available gratitude just outside our window.

–Marsha de la O

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Anita Pulier‘s new collection is more than lovely. It is exquisite and reaches to the very core that hides beneath our everyday existence. Here the mundane brushes against and uncovers its counterpart—the otherworldly essence of love, memory and beauty.

–Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]