Reposed is a book of poetry concerned with keeping the memory and history of a family alive when the photographic record of it has been lost. Coming of age in the Boomer years of the 1950s and 60s, the author, our tomboy narrator, introduces us to her military family with southern roots. It includes a drunken aunt, a cookie salesmen, a malicious nun, a mother who hates her teeth, and a cousin booked and fingerprinted for keeping a pig within city limits. Their lives aren't just humorous however. Alcoholism snakes through this family, affecting and damaging each generation. Not everyone survives it. Many stories were undoubtedly lost along with the family photos that were sold at an estate sale by the author's father. Fortunately, in these pages, a few are rescued and find new life.
Reposed is a book of poetry concerned with keeping the memory and history of a family alive when the photographic record of it has been lost. Coming of age in the Boomer years of the 1950s and 60s, the author, our tomboy narrator, introduces us to her military family with southern roots. It includes a drunken aunt, a cookie salesmen, a malicious nun, a mother who hates her teeth, and a cousin booked and fingerprinted for keeping a pig within city limits. Their lives aren't just humorous however. Alcoholism snakes through this family, affecting and damaging each generation. Not everyone survives it. Many stories were undoubtedly lost along with the family photos that were sold at an estate sale by the author's father. Fortunately, in these pages, a few are rescued and find new life.
Charlotte McCaffrey was born in Mobile, Alabama. During her childhood, her family moved around the country, from California and Massachusetts to Maryland and Hawaii. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and then spent many years in the Midwest working as a chef. In 1989, she moved to northern California where she was an elementary special education teacher for 25 years. Her work has appeared in Borderlands, Bayou, The Comstock Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, Sojourner, Women's Studies Quarterly, and many other journals and anthologies. Currently, she is retired and lives with her partner in the San Francisco Bay area where she writes, gardens, cooks, and dotes on her dogs.
In Reposed, Charlotte McCaffrey chronicles family tragedies with the clear-sightedness of a sentimental sharpshooter. The poetic series begins with the accidental auctioning off of a family's photo collection, and writing portraits of those fixed in time, it delves into multiple losses. Reposed is an unflinching testament to vast social changes of the 20th century, of those who survived them and those who did not. Sharon Coleman, author of Paris Blinks In poems exquisitely crafted, richly imagistic, and psychologically complex, Charlotte McCaffrey's Reposed from its first poem, "Testimony," to its last poem, "Settlement," reveals snapshots of a family ravaged by generational alcoholism. McCaffrey's riveting sequence stands "akimbo" and is refreshingly transparent, revelatory, and in places even comedic. Bravo for Reposed, McCaffrey's first volume of poetry! Rosa Lane, author of Tiller North and Roots and Reckonings
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