The Girl from Yesterday, Poems by June Sylvester Saraceno

Yesterday, today, tomorrow: June Sylvester Saraceno's The Girl from Yesterday touches the flow of time and memory, with hard-won vision and knowledge.

Sample Poems by June Sylvester Saraceno

"June Sylvester Saraceno's The Girl from Yesterday excavates bloodlines, legacy, birthright, and dissolution with bravery and honesty. Saraceno's poems about her son, father, mother, and ultimately 'the blue plate of marriage smashed,' transcend the ordinary and illuminate the human experience of love, loss, and redemption. Here, we discover in one poem how a girl becomes extraordinary and how the speaker in another poem knows, 'If I don't open it [the window], I'll never get out.' These poems ultimately teach us about relationships, memory, liberation-and the resilient grace of a remarkable poet." -Lee Herrick

"June Sylvester Saraceno has earned every word she writes. And though there are many beautiful lines in this book -like these, of dusk in Paris- 'The rooftops plank and bird,/ the rooftops blue and sunset,' there are almost as many that evoke doing what has to be done. For the first time in years, T.S. Eliot's famous lines, 'Teach us to care and not to care,' come to my mind. Why? Because June Sylvester Saraceno has learned both lessons and she has learned them well. -Lola Haskins

"'My hand is always poised to bless,' June Sylvester Saraceno imagines the 'Lady in Green and Gold' saying from Luis Jose Estremadagro's painting, but Saraceno blesses us with her own hand here, blesses us with every single one of these poems. 'I string together a necklace of memories,' she writes in her poem 'Leftovers' and it's easy to see each poem in this collection as a gorgeously crafted bead, some elegiac, some celebratory, strung together to create a breathtaking whole, something to hold close to the heart." -Gayle Brandeis

ISBN: 978-1625493347, 104 pages, $98.00

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