cover image The Escape

The Escape

Jo Ann Wasserman. Futurepoem, $14 (120pp) ISBN 978-0-9716800-2-9

""The notes begin with the words motherhood, fortune, providence, the stars and then depression, waves of corruption & rot."" So begins The Escape by Jo Ann Wasserman, chronicling the life of a woman poet on the '90s East Coast, with blanked-out drinking, sex and ""a house in Queens with linoleum and a plastic train"" finally dissolving into the title poem's primal scene-visiting, and leaving, mother: ""I make x's on the days left until I leave, and then the day arrives and I go. The trail of x's follow me.""