Blue Suburbia : Almost a Memoir

Rating:
Summary: THE DARK HEART OF THE SUBURBS
Review: I felt like Laurie Albanese was writing my story, and it's not one I've read before -- a look at growing up in blue-collar suburbia and the struggle, only sometimes successful, to get out. Her poem about riding to college with her parents is seared into my mind and heart forever. This is a memoir for every girl who grew up too smart for her family.

Rating:
Summary: Blue Suburbia
Review: Laurie Lico Albanese has written a book of great beauty, which raises the quotidien and everyday to the level of great literature. In her final poem she asks, "Is anything ever truly ordinary?" and invites the reader to see their own lives in a new light. In her "almost-memoir" Albanese chronicles both the large and small events which shape her as a person, from her childhood in suburban working-class Long Island, to her initiation into sexuality, art, love and loss. Throughout, Lico has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, that make her poems breathe with life, even as she takes on the most compelling questions of existence. The reader's heart races along with Albanese as she experiences acute anxiety, crippling self doubt and crushing boredom. Her ability to experience life with such vivid force--from her overpowering love for her child, to her reignited passion for her husband, to her triumph as a writer--redeem her and reward the reader. That the arc of a life can be so well captured in a slim volume of free verse poetry, as accesible and haunting as a Bruce Springsteen album, is an incredible thing to behold.

Rating:
Summary: Blue Suburbia
Review: There are many books we've all read where the main character has endured many of the same things as are written about in Blue Suburbia. For some reason, however, that those same circumstances are written in free verse seems to make them slap a reader upside the head with the reality of it all. The language of Blue Suburbia is wonderfully sparse which, I think, emphasizes the actions...there are no flowery or minimizing adjectives or adverbs to take the sting out of the nouns and verbs. The word imageries linger long after closing the cover on Blue Suburbia.

Rating:
Summary: Stark Reality...
Review: There are many books we've all read where the main character has endured many of the same things as are written about in Blue Suburbia. For some reason, however, that those same circumstances are written in free verse seems to make them slap a reader upside the head with the reality of it all. The language of Blue Suburbia is wonderfully sparse which, I think, emphasizes the actions...there are no flowery or minimizing adjectives or adverbs to take the sting out of the nouns and verbs. The word imageries linger long after closing the cover on Blue Suburbia.