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Leftovers
Leftovers--the stuff that comes out when a relationship ends; when a death happens; when you become yourself fully. These poems are my leftovers--strength and vulnerability I never knew I had.
- GenresPoetry
101 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 7, 2015
36 people want to read
About the author
Lachrista Greco
3 books92 followersWriter, speaker, and librarian, Lachrista Greco is the author/editor of the anthology, Olive Grrrls: Italian North American Women & The Search For Identity (2013) and the book of poetry, Leftovers (2015). Her writing was also published in the anthology, Post-Traumatically Stressed Feminist (2017). She has recently published her memoir, The Guerrilla Feminist: A Search For Belonging Online and Offline (Iskra Books, 2025), and is working on a new book of poems titled, Lift Me Out of the Wound.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 13, 2015
I liked it.
Which is, of course, the most uninteresting thing someone can say about a book, especially a book of poetry. It makes the response about the reader, not the work. But I'm going to start there because I'm feeling my way toward how to talk about the book.
I've been reading more poetry, lately, and definitely more books about poetry, but I still don't feel I have a good vocabulary for talking about it. I also know Greco, a little, through social media: well, I know her persona, as this book reminds me, not her. ("Digitize Me.")
The book is a collection of short verse, most of it extremely short, three or four lines per page. Which isn't a bad thing, mind, just what it is--and gives body to the title, "Leftovers" (more on that in a minute). In general, the poems seem to come from an emotional space just beyond anger: there's frustration here, and it often burns, but it is viewed from a distance, sometimes dismissive of the object of anger, sometimes indifferent, sometimes still caught. And that is something else, a lot of the poems, even in their brevity, deal with paradox--wanting what you don't want, loving what you hate, fearing what you need and needing what you fear. Beyond he emotional valences, and the structures, there are a few recurring images that help to make the book cohesive--more than just a collection of poems. To use musical analogy, it's like an album, in the old-fashioned sense of that word, a collection that hangs together--but it's not a concept album in the manner of a long narrative poem or even one tightly held together by the linking lines (like Scary, No Scary, for example). The images I noticed were butterflies (as symbols of the peace that passeth understanding, as some might say, though I doubt Greco would totally sign off on that); the heart as an organ and a symbol; men, as specific individuals and also as a class of being.
The subject matter is almost without exception incredibly personal, dealign with failed loves, affairs, the crushing expectations on generation places on another, the wounds of love--and the complicated relationship between the desire to run away and the need to seek out love again; and sexual assault, including Greco's own recognition that she has distanced herself from the raw emotions of those experiences by talking (and writing) about it--that paradox again. (I don't mean to treat her experiences so lightly: I'm trying to come to grips with the poems as pieces of art.)
According to the back copy, this is her second book of poems--I've not read the first--and it feels to me like a journeywoman effort. There is not the overly dramatic, overly-effulgent poem one (stereotypically) associated with teenage poetry. Her voice is more controlled than that, her language precise, allowing her to limn a subject in a few lines. The symbolism enriches the poems without overwhelming them. That's not t say there aren't some poems so light as to not quite seem to fit into the collection--"Guerrilla Feminism," for example, though, from the dedication (and her social media activism) I get why Greco would include it. Some of it echoes the patter of a modern yoga class--she is a trained yoga instructor--and these carry with them some of the same feeling of emptiness inherent in that vocabulary: it's not that yoga instructors are insincere or even that what they are saying is incorrect--there's usually a gem inside--it's that the packaging feels clichéd. Here I'm thinking of "Breaking Open" or "Do Something." Other poems--"Which is Worse," "My Creation"--are insightful without feeling anodyne, and so are, to me, more powerful.
Greco's at her consistently strongest when she is telling her own story in seemingly simple (but structured) language, These are the poems that focus on her family, her immediate experiences. We don't know the other person(s) involved, but sense them through her--and even as she is angry, she is open enough to irony and paradox to sometimes give them their due. (Sometimes they don't deserve that, and her righteousness carries the poem just fine.) Less successful are when she universalizes--but perhaps this is just a personal preference of mine. "Men" as a category make the poems less affective. I'm not trying to back-door in an argument about "not all men": Greco's complaints about the male of the species, variety Americanus, are correct. It's just that the target is so diffuse that the poem becomes so, too, without the gut-punch feel of the poems rooted in direct experience.
Not that all the poems are straightforward. Greco does have a gift for figurative language; she uses it sparingly, but to devastating effect, and my two favorite poems are abstract, but without being diffuse or universalized. There's the wonderfully titled "Fuck the Sun," which nicely inverts the connotations of night and dark--I guess that's another bit of work she's doing, inverting expectations and the stereotypes that have become attached to our language in political ways that no longer seem political. (Thus, her poems, from a feminist perspective, are necessarily political, while non-feminist or even anti-feminist poems are seen as apolitical, although of course they aren't. That's important work, and my acknowledgment of it shouldn't be buried in this parenthesis: the risk of writing while thinking something through.)
At any rate, the poem goes, "Beware of May--/when the sun/is overconfident/and bickers/with the Moon.//Dearest Moon,/you have/the stars/on your side."
The other is "-Zio/Water Sign":
"I think about
your bones--
and that they
looked like
before they
turned to dust--
and I think about
you opening the
blood streams on your wrists
and anchoring yourself
further into
the ocean.
You were never
meant to survive
on land, anyways.
These are the poems that show ways forward for Greco, in her growth, to a mature--masterly--poetry. She has the insights, and the language: she needs to use those to making a more substantial meal, whether poems in extended form or the short fragments she opts for here.
Which brings me to the title, one I find striking. And I have wrestled with what she meant by it. I think there are a couple of levels going on here. There's the sense of leftovers from the dedication and the first and last poems (also called leftovers, which is the obvious reason why the collection might be so named): it is a poem about things we have left behind or re trying to leave behind. There might be a self-deprecating joke--these are poems Greco herself has left over; although that interpretation only works for some of the lighter verses here. I also couldn't help but think of leftovers in terms of food--although food is not a frequent image here--and the politics of it: remember all those times your parents said not to throw away the leftovers because children, somewhere, are starving. There's a sense, then, that leftovers still have work to do, and that there's a political dimension to the things we throw away. (Obviously, my food example doesn't work, 'cause it's not like you could package up those left overs and send them to the starving kids in [fill-in blank, depending upon parents and generation: China, Africa, Europe]. It's a silly parentism. But it hints at these broader issues.)
Given the range of meanings, then, I do find the cover not up to the book: it makes it seem too soft, too unengaged. So in this case the cliche is true: don't judge the book by the cover. There's good stuff in here, strong and insightful, and worthy of a read.
Which is, of course, the most uninteresting thing someone can say about a book, especially a book of poetry. It makes the response about the reader, not the work. But I'm going to start there because I'm feeling my way toward how to talk about the book.
I've been reading more poetry, lately, and definitely more books about poetry, but I still don't feel I have a good vocabulary for talking about it. I also know Greco, a little, through social media: well, I know her persona, as this book reminds me, not her. ("Digitize Me.")
The book is a collection of short verse, most of it extremely short, three or four lines per page. Which isn't a bad thing, mind, just what it is--and gives body to the title, "Leftovers" (more on that in a minute). In general, the poems seem to come from an emotional space just beyond anger: there's frustration here, and it often burns, but it is viewed from a distance, sometimes dismissive of the object of anger, sometimes indifferent, sometimes still caught. And that is something else, a lot of the poems, even in their brevity, deal with paradox--wanting what you don't want, loving what you hate, fearing what you need and needing what you fear. Beyond he emotional valences, and the structures, there are a few recurring images that help to make the book cohesive--more than just a collection of poems. To use musical analogy, it's like an album, in the old-fashioned sense of that word, a collection that hangs together--but it's not a concept album in the manner of a long narrative poem or even one tightly held together by the linking lines (like Scary, No Scary, for example). The images I noticed were butterflies (as symbols of the peace that passeth understanding, as some might say, though I doubt Greco would totally sign off on that); the heart as an organ and a symbol; men, as specific individuals and also as a class of being.
The subject matter is almost without exception incredibly personal, dealign with failed loves, affairs, the crushing expectations on generation places on another, the wounds of love--and the complicated relationship between the desire to run away and the need to seek out love again; and sexual assault, including Greco's own recognition that she has distanced herself from the raw emotions of those experiences by talking (and writing) about it--that paradox again. (I don't mean to treat her experiences so lightly: I'm trying to come to grips with the poems as pieces of art.)
According to the back copy, this is her second book of poems--I've not read the first--and it feels to me like a journeywoman effort. There is not the overly dramatic, overly-effulgent poem one (stereotypically) associated with teenage poetry. Her voice is more controlled than that, her language precise, allowing her to limn a subject in a few lines. The symbolism enriches the poems without overwhelming them. That's not t say there aren't some poems so light as to not quite seem to fit into the collection--"Guerrilla Feminism," for example, though, from the dedication (and her social media activism) I get why Greco would include it. Some of it echoes the patter of a modern yoga class--she is a trained yoga instructor--and these carry with them some of the same feeling of emptiness inherent in that vocabulary: it's not that yoga instructors are insincere or even that what they are saying is incorrect--there's usually a gem inside--it's that the packaging feels clichéd. Here I'm thinking of "Breaking Open" or "Do Something." Other poems--"Which is Worse," "My Creation"--are insightful without feeling anodyne, and so are, to me, more powerful.
Greco's at her consistently strongest when she is telling her own story in seemingly simple (but structured) language, These are the poems that focus on her family, her immediate experiences. We don't know the other person(s) involved, but sense them through her--and even as she is angry, she is open enough to irony and paradox to sometimes give them their due. (Sometimes they don't deserve that, and her righteousness carries the poem just fine.) Less successful are when she universalizes--but perhaps this is just a personal preference of mine. "Men" as a category make the poems less affective. I'm not trying to back-door in an argument about "not all men": Greco's complaints about the male of the species, variety Americanus, are correct. It's just that the target is so diffuse that the poem becomes so, too, without the gut-punch feel of the poems rooted in direct experience.
Not that all the poems are straightforward. Greco does have a gift for figurative language; she uses it sparingly, but to devastating effect, and my two favorite poems are abstract, but without being diffuse or universalized. There's the wonderfully titled "Fuck the Sun," which nicely inverts the connotations of night and dark--I guess that's another bit of work she's doing, inverting expectations and the stereotypes that have become attached to our language in political ways that no longer seem political. (Thus, her poems, from a feminist perspective, are necessarily political, while non-feminist or even anti-feminist poems are seen as apolitical, although of course they aren't. That's important work, and my acknowledgment of it shouldn't be buried in this parenthesis: the risk of writing while thinking something through.)
At any rate, the poem goes, "Beware of May--/when the sun/is overconfident/and bickers/with the Moon.//Dearest Moon,/you have/the stars/on your side."
The other is "-Zio/Water Sign":
"I think about
your bones--
and that they
looked like
before they
turned to dust--
and I think about
you opening the
blood streams on your wrists
and anchoring yourself
further into
the ocean.
You were never
meant to survive
on land, anyways.
These are the poems that show ways forward for Greco, in her growth, to a mature--masterly--poetry. She has the insights, and the language: she needs to use those to making a more substantial meal, whether poems in extended form or the short fragments she opts for here.
Which brings me to the title, one I find striking. And I have wrestled with what she meant by it. I think there are a couple of levels going on here. There's the sense of leftovers from the dedication and the first and last poems (also called leftovers, which is the obvious reason why the collection might be so named): it is a poem about things we have left behind or re trying to leave behind. There might be a self-deprecating joke--these are poems Greco herself has left over; although that interpretation only works for some of the lighter verses here. I also couldn't help but think of leftovers in terms of food--although food is not a frequent image here--and the politics of it: remember all those times your parents said not to throw away the leftovers because children, somewhere, are starving. There's a sense, then, that leftovers still have work to do, and that there's a political dimension to the things we throw away. (Obviously, my food example doesn't work, 'cause it's not like you could package up those left overs and send them to the starving kids in [fill-in blank, depending upon parents and generation: China, Africa, Europe]. It's a silly parentism. But it hints at these broader issues.)
Given the range of meanings, then, I do find the cover not up to the book: it makes it seem too soft, too unengaged. So in this case the cliche is true: don't judge the book by the cover. There's good stuff in here, strong and insightful, and worthy of a read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review