The Privacy of Wind: Poems

In Eskimo, anerca means ""to breathe, to make poetry,"" as readers learn in this collection's first poem. That poetry is an act as natural and necessary as breathing is a premise underlying Longo's casual free verse style and forthright confessionalism. Despite such powerful subjects as the death of her elderly mother and the life-threatening anorexia suffered by her daughter, Longo's stylistic informality can diminish the impact of her work. In ""sin,"" for example, the speaker acknowledges the blurred borders between being a mother's daughter and a daughter's mother, but in unexceptional language, unexceptionally used: ""don't leave when I say I love you/ let it last longer than these few years/ don't back away..."" When, however, the language is less like breathing, the poems spark with candor and insight. In ""Teepee at a Childhood Haunt,"" a teepee constructed on the riverbank where the speaker once fished with her father draws a nexus of disturbing memories: ""the teepee/ round and shining with the queerest light, as if cut/ from electricity, pointed purposefully to the sun, poles/ meeting at the center, the round that dizzies, brings back/ to the beginning as we open."" (Aug.)