cover image Finders

Finders

Julie Parson-Nesbitt. West End Press, $8.95 (60pp) ISBN 978-0-931122-83-5

In her accessible, often powerful debut, Parson-Nesbitt, a Chicago native, mines that city's multicultural history and energy to inform her gritty, graceful poems about identity and contemporary urban life. Buoyed by a quiet sense of humor, and in an eloquent free-verse style, the collection carries the commanding colloquial rhythm of a spoken-word performance. The poems weave autobiography-elements like her Jewish background, her marriage to an African American man (to which roughly a third of the book's poems are devoted) and her work as an ESL teacher-with broader themes of race and nationality that, like the exploration of Auschwitz and contemporary racial hatred in ""Memorial,"" are grounded in particulars: ""To love most/ in yourself what others would gladly/ kill you for/ is to know exactly/ who you are."" In the impressive six-section poem, ""Twelfth Tribe,"" the poet addresses tragedy in Brooklyn's Crown Heights with faulty memories of her own orthodox Jewish grandfather (""I remember my grandfather/ in the parts of myself/ I invent for a past/ that has immigrants, prayers,/ and an American river""). Parson-Nesbitt's most memorable poems dissolve the boundaries between the personal, social and political. (Apr.)