Minnows Small as Sixteenth Notes: The Collected Poems of Norma Kassirer

Your belief in transcendent linguistic delight may have faded long ago but Norma Kassirer’s inexhaustible poetic universe will never fail to change you. Kassirer is dedicated to language’s folds and revelations and to what might be called a post-biblical garden of wit. Her eye is part Victorian lamppost, part timeless moon; and her ear confirms that magic still hums through our busy grief, our storms and stress. Read her and live.––Janet Kaplan, author of Dreamlife of a PhilanthropistSurrealist, postmodernist, humorist––all these and more describe Norma Kassirer as a poet. Metaphor “comes rolling up a hill from a lobster net” and pulls us into irresistible play. Themes recur: cats, music, loss of autonomy in old age. Although “the rented Jell-O is easily / returnable,” the “Hydro Hall of Memory is no more,” and so we must take care not to offend our linden trees. What do “cats jugglers & acrobats” have in common? Read this book and find multiple answers.––Anne-Adele Wight, author of Opera House ArterialNorma Kassirer, widely known as the author of the delightful Magic Elizabeth, brings the same imagination, intelligence, whimsy, and delight to the poetry collected here. This work opens into a deceptively simple range of language implicated in a world of ordinary Jell-O molds and sunsets. Don’t be fooled. The mind at work here is astonishing in its attention to minutiae that always offer more – more meaning, more life, more love:The little Jell-O molds were empty of purpose & still may be. Here in the kitchen next to theeverlasting blue-flame––Michael Boughn, author of City, Book One: Singular Assumptions