The Laugh We Make When We Fall

In Susan Firers The Laugh We Make When We Fall, peonies; snow drops, with all their survivor ecstasies; windy caravans of lilacs; and Dali Lama-robed daylilies act as magnets to attract historypersonal and historicalmyths, language, facts, love, gratitude, prayers, beauty, and all the colors of death and sex. Family oddities appear in this collection, as well as Catholic rituals, saints, and ghost poets. Always ghost poets: Whitman, Neruda, Thoreau, and Saint Francis. In these poems, toads/ pull their finished skins off/ delicately as evening gloves, and in Birds you can look into an injured birds neck and see everywhere it had ever flown see insects, & seeds, & amphibians,/ & even a piece or two of snake. Using list poems, exploded elemental odes, lyrics, and American sonnets, Firer writes her own survivor ecstasies: I was buried under/deaths: mothers, fathers, sisters deaths wrapped me/ like surgical wrap. And who and where would I be/ when all their gauzy deaths were removed? In poem after poem in this collection, Firer begins to explore and to answer that question. This collection is "a wild generosity of spirit," creating an effect that is "sacramental."