My BOOKS
Accidents of Being: Poems from a Philadelphia Neighborhood
Mary Rohrer-Dann’s new collection of poems explores the world surrounding Philadelphia’s Burholme Park, a world intimately personal yet also universally familiar. Spanning generations, a diverse cast of characters belong to this neighborhood but also to this nation, and we recognize in their stories so much of our own collective history. Clearly, Accidents of Being is no accidental triumph, but a bittersweet narrative and often lyrically haunting tour de force.
—Martin Lammon, Fuller E. Callaway endowed Flannery O’Connor Chair in Creative Writing at Georgia College (1997-2018), author of News From Where I Live and The Long Road Home
Taking the Long Way Home
“We don’t need a new mother,” declares a bereft, eight-year-old, after devastating loss. Into this postwar, Philadelphia family enters a German-born “second mother”—with memories of searching “the ravaged henhouse / for eggs missed by starving soldiers.”
The evolving relationship between child and step-mother upends stereotypes and re-configures, with compassion and wisdom, the mother-daughter paradigm. By the book’s close, as roles reverse, all move through “rooms stenciled now with absence.” This book-length narrative sequence makes a unique contribution to poems of family and how we rebuild them.
--Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me
La Scaffetta: Poems from The Foundling Drawer
A cloistered orphan-girl orchestra. The canals, palaces, and pageants of baroque Venice. A jealous music teacher. The composer-priest Antonio Vivaldi. At center, a brilliant young violinist, Gabriella.
These poems interweave Gabriella’s story with the stories of the other girls and women of Ospedale della Pieta. Women of multiple talent: violinists, cellists, flautists, sopranos, altos, tenors. Women of valuable skills and trades: cooks, chemists, lace-makers, serving maids.