The poems in <i>Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes</i> are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many—cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces—a drag queen waitress whose "painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight, " "strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds, " Pink Floyd's "'On the Turning Away' sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead, " black phoebes rattling "winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is . . . " Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.
Tentang Penulis
<b>Cheryl Dumesnil's</b> books include the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize winner, <i>In Praise of Falling</i>, the memoir <i>Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood, </i> and the anthology <i>Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, </i> co-edited with Kim Addonizio.