The clarity of voice in Vando's second collection feels deliberate in its desire to convey basic information about the world. "On Hearing that a Potato Costs $70 in Sarajevo," for example, meditates on the importance of the tuber from Ireland to Boston, Maine to the Midwest and Peru to Amsterdam: "the Irish potato—/ even though its zigzag journey started in Peru,/ crossing the Atlantic in the deep hull of Spanish/ shame, where some poor slob of a galley slave/ found himself jodido
through centuries of KP;/ even though all of Europe thrived on it through/ two world wars." (Vando's interest in the potato can also be seen in her edited collection Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems to Benefit Hunger Relief.)
The poems are situated in a wide range of geographic locations (including Puerto Rico, Texas, Vienna, Munich, Italy and the U.S. Southwest), and there are a number of poems written with great respect to various fellow travelers like poets Marvin Bell, Gertrude Stein and Gerald Stern, composer Morton Feldman, Vietnam war photographer Huynh Cong Ut and artist Elizabeth "Grandma" Layton. But the majority of the poems in this collection tell small and yet very dramatic stories. One tells the story of a lost child in the Museum of Natural History found stroking a fawn's neck and crying "poor thing, poor little thing." In another, a Blackshirt tries to seduce a blonde Jew. Another has a woman who sleeps beneath a heavy painting fantasizing of it decapitating her so she will be found by her wandering husband. In yet another, a father picks up his son and dangles him off the edge of Liberty Memorial while yelling, "you can always trust me." While Vando doesn't always achieve such resonant contrasts, readers will trust her wry beheadings of pretense. (Mar.)
