REQUITEMENTS
Revised edition
In this revised edition (Elephant Tree House 2015), the essay “A Poetics of Adoption: Love and Grief” and several more poems join the original collection. See sample poems below the reviews.
To order, email me: star at rosemarystarace dot com
$10 plus postage
“This is a poetry very much like the blues, full of lacrimae rerum, and reading it, hearing it, I feel the tension unknotting in my gut and a weight lifting in my chest I didn’t even know was there.”
—Dave Bonta on Via Negativa. Read full review of original edition here.
“Requitements transcends the unanswerable questions to get at the heart of who we are. Starace finds a balance in her own nature that becomes universal, a personal mystery anyone can identify with. I admire how the understory of loneliness, finding its way through kinship with the natural world, becomes so compelling and uplifting. These poems adopt the reader, and it feels right.”
—Barry Sternlieb, author of Winter Crows
“Requitements is bursting with flocks, broods, and congregations of wavelets, pines, grackles, sunflowers, and other closely-related creatures. The speaker of these poems is, as an adoptee, looking for her place among them. She discovers not only kinship but kindness, her own generous spirit mirrored in a hundred fleeting reflections. Starace finds lovely slant-rhymes between herself and the world, demonstrating vividly that, as her dream-Einstein suggests, all space is compassion.”
—Lesley Wheeler,
author of Heterotopia and Radioland
“Requitements is a book filled with the ache of yearning and the delight of recognition. Starace sees the world through the double vision of her life as an adoptee, exploring the possibilities of doubleness in language and imagery. Everywhere there are two of everything —two mothers, two identities, even the instruments played in the title poem: the doubled string / the mandolin, the dulcimer. In ‘I Am Double,’ a calling is also a caul, twoness rows her toward her destination.
“And while the speaker in ‘Confession’ wants nothing more than an ordinary road, one senses Starace’s pleasure in the less than ordinary directions she takes in these poems where delight and sorrow live side by side.”
—Michelle Gillett,
author of Blinding the Goldfinches and The Green Cottage
Revised edition published by Elephant Tree House, March, 2015.
Original edition published March 2010.
(book cover photo by Alan P. Hayes)
