September 17, 2018
Read (Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral) traces the changes that age brings in her second collection, foregrounding the perspective of a mother reminiscing while wrestling with the work of raising teenage children. The book is loosely chronological, beginning in the speaker’s youth in the 1970s, with occasional flashes forward and back. Read’s lyric narratives move across a typically suburban landscape, from home to school and from the great outdoors to the diner: “go sit at the lunch counter with the old people/ eating patty melts and drinking black coffee.” Her youthful touchpoints include 1980s films, ZZ Top records, Galway Kinnell poems, and years of Catholic schooling. The collection’s second half hinges on the poem “Wicked,” with its echoes of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno: “Here I am in the middle of my life or maybe even/ closer to the end, safe in a house/ with a gabled roof like the kind I used to draw.” Thinking of her son, Read’s speaker appreciates and laments “the slow/ unwinding of the spool between us, the years/ of gradually touching him less so that now/I even forget sometimes to kiss him goodnight.” As Read draws out the relations between mothers and sons, she homes in on time, its passing, and the details that endure.