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Looking at the past and present with a glass clear as memory and sharp as a razor blade. The lens allows truth and beauty and untruth and unbeauty, the razor blade saves everything from becoming "sweet memory." Jonathan Rothschild's debut is a rare book in that it sees everyone: the grandfather wondering what has become of what he has made; the grandmother lost in a haze of faulty neural inputs; the parents who connect and stray and have problems as well as successes but who somehow through it all care deeply; and the children (always the children) who can't quite provide hope because the lens is too clear to get sentimental about the possibilities of life facing them. This is a poetry that embraces everything and doesn't lie about any of it. Clear language, clear vision. Love and truth.
--Charles Alexander
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