Atlas

Rating:
Summary: Transcends time while drawing upon personal family artifacts
Review: The debut poetry collection of Katrina Vandenberg employs a language and flair for expression that transcends time while drawing upon personal family artifacts, memories, ideas, and friends. Marrying Late: When I think of what it means not to marry/the high school sweetheart, but to find each other/as we did at ages thirty and forty, I think/of John and I singing along to an old cassette/of Jackson Browne on car trips, and how, as we sing,/a part of me is hearing the song for the first time/in Detroit, on WRIF with my first boyfriend/in his truck as he took curves, shifting hard and fast./And probably John is making love with a black-haired girl/in the carpeted back of his van in 1979, out west,/the cassette new and popular, draining the battery./How unlikely that we ended up traveling together/singing a song we each learned with someone else./Neither of us minds that, the way we might have then.