Publisher's Synopsis
Sideris carries us through grief, memory, family, and the pandemic. These poems, some originally jotted on paper napkins, show us ourselves, in our absurdity, our generosity, and our legacy.
Written during the pandemic in the working class, immigrant neighborhood of Kensington, Brooklyn, LIBERTY LAUNDRY is a book about freedom, work, grief, love, and the civic and familial divisions and estrangements that have deepened with each new variant of the virus.
'My daughter cuts my damaged/ends in the garden behind/her father's house where, /per his orders, I am not welcome--' Hilary Sideris' poems flash forward at lightning speed. Before you can blink, there's a back story, details become volatile, and we're catapulted into unfathomable history. The Q train goes express, a plague strikes. The America of 'foaming root beer/in thick glass mugs' confronts active shooter drills. A 'BLT's pale tomato implies a vast system of servitude. Always, language is a bridge and a wall. Always, events elude the stories we shelter in. Jaime Sabines wrote, 'everything happens in silence/the way light is made in the eye;' Sideris can access that inscrutability of experience, how we know ourselves only through clues and only in retrospect. LIBERTY LAUNDRY is a book of gorgeous immediacy and depth.--D. Nurkse
Poetry.
