My Father's Kites

The depth of her craft allows her to dissect her grief mixed with anger, disappointment and love. She uses sonnets and villanelles to tease out every feeling she woul prefer not to confront. Truly great work!

This collection features sonnets about the speaker's complicated grief over the loss of her father, a creative but often cruel man. The poems speak to loss and all of its ripples, including the memories of earlier losses that new loss engenders. A short but emotional book of poignant poems.

Allison Joseph's latest book of poems, My Father's Kites, is about the kinds of feelings that don't just leave when a parent dies, but follow the offspring around, refusing to let go. Reading it, I was reminded of the mixed feelings Sharon Olds manages to convey in her poems about her own family. The central sonnet sequence builds up a nuanced portrait of Joseph's father and his relationships with those around him, full of hurt, love, anger, estrangement, and bristly pride. The book follows the tradition of the sonnet sequence as poems that explore love from many different angles, some of them negative. Each poem focuses on a different event or memory: hearing news of her father's death, seeing his body, finding his résumé, developing the film in his camera, remembering his stylish clothes or volatile temper. Throughout, there is an effort not to deny what made him difficult, but to understand the strains that made him what he was, such as being abandoned by his own father and losing his wife to cancer.I particularly appreciated the double meanings in many of the titles, the way the poems manage to be about several things at once. For instance, "Deferred," which recounts the father's identification with the character of Walter in the play A Raisin in the Sun, alludes to Langston Hughes' poem "A Dream Deferred," from which the play took its title, but also to the father's unwillingness to face the way the play critiques his own values. The villanelles, rondeau, pantoum, and free verse at the beginning and end form a welcome contrast to the sonnets, and they explore Joseph's feelings about the role of herself as author, as in the final poem, "A Daughter's Villanelle," which starts "If you could read these words, I'm sure you'd damn / me straight to hell for everything I've said. / I write about your life because I can."