cover image Famous

Famous

Kathleen Flenniken. Bison Books, $17.95 (74pp) ISBN 978-0-8032-6924-8

Flenniken's understated debut, winner of the Prarie Schooner Book Prize, weaves together two seemingly antithetical themes: the comic indignations and attractions of minor celebrities, and the everyday joys and sorrows of family life. A love of plainspoken language informs these ironically modest, lines: ""I'm no smarter than Miss Scarlet in her// tawdry side-slit dress,"" she writes, assuming the voice of Colonel Mustard from the board game Clue. Later poems consider the lives of somewhat famous figures, such as story writer Shirley Jackson and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; their troubles sit uneasily beside Flenniken's heartfelt portraits of her ailing, and now deceased, mother. Ordinariness-our need for it, and our frustrations with it-becomes Flenniken's signature subject: the quietest evenings ""make you what you are."" Flenniken sometimes errs on the side of modesty, making her speech consistently trustworthy but rarely elevated or exciting. She has fashioned a poetry comfortable with self-imposed limits: ""Pray to the neighbor's dog,"" she urges, ""who finally learned to live on a chain."" She still finds herself searching after mysteries, in board games, novels, and her own life, lauding ""this idea that you could step out of your life/ unafraid, with no worldly need but to find who done it.""