Year of the Snake

My husband, who does not read poetry, read this book in one sitting. I took longer -- each of these poems seems to ask to be reread before allowing the reader to move on to the next one. Lee Ann Roripaugh is an alchemist, transforming pain and confusion into gems of insight. Her formidable powers of observation are evident here, but these are not documentary poems. Instead, they interpret a universe of things, animals, and people, providing one "ah-ha!" moment after another as the human condition is delicately but firmly presented to the reader. "Octopus in the Freezer," for example, explores timeless issues -- empathy, fate, change, liberty -- in a poem of extraordinary moral and intellectual clarity. Every reader will find a favorite poem in this book. And when you're ready for more, try Roripaugh's first collection, Beyond Heart Mountain. There's a poem about sushi in that book that's vivid enough to make you taste the rice.

Reading Lee Ann Roripaugh's second collection, Year of the Snake, is feeling the warmth of sitting outside under a parasol in spring, then glancing down at one's feet to see a luminescent moth in her death throes; reading Roripaugh is to witness dark and light in one precise series of instants. Her poems are rich in both narrative engagement and lyrical flow; they give space for the language of the ethereal and the everyday to meet. One poem references both Nanking cherry trees and bright orange Sanka cans, another, the multiple limbs of a Hindu goddess and DDT. Here is the story of a little girl growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam War: "My parents wrapped an old sheet/around the playpen to shield me/from the television, but I learned/to pull up the edge and peer out/from underneath to see newsreels/from Vietnam." And here is a richness sifted from the particulars of one person's life that let's the reader know his or her own life more fully. I highly recommend this book to all who love poetry-and even to those who do not.

Lee Ann Roripaugh's poetry uses creatures from nature that writers often use as metaphors for change and transition; moths and snakes are two examples. But what she can do that no one else precisely can is translate them anew through her history as a woman raised in midwest America by a mother who is Japanese. Kimonos and cherry blossoms are woven as seamlessly as Rubbermaid and Shur-Fine lima beans into her verse, and these differences between traditional, resonant Japanese symbols and America's brand-name adorned details illustrate how two disparate cultures that have influenced and indeed, defined her identity, an identity the speaker of her poetry continues to explore. And because she uses common metaphors of transition (but in an uncommon way), Roripaugh makes herself accessible to many. But my words can't do hers any justice. May it suffice to say that I can directly connect a recent poem and a painting of my own to moments when I was inspired while reading Year of the Snake, and I can't remember the last time any book propelled me that much. Buy it. Breathe it in. And be inspired for yourself.

Lee Ann Roripaugh's *Year of the Snake* is recursively focused on interstitial spaces: she complicates the boundaries of East/West, humans/animals, mother/daughter, and confession/myth; the pull of these hybridizing elements takes her poetry down dark and inventive avenues. As in nearly all of Roripaugh's poetry, mother and daughter bonds and relations with the natural world are explored through delicately tough insights. "Transplanting" is the fulcrum for these thoughts; placed in the exact middle of the collection, this longer poem balances the speaker's loyal admiration for her mother with a constant curiosity about nature. In recreating the speaker's mother's journey from Japan to the United States, the poem fluctuates between humorous explorations, "How do you chart the diaspora / of a sneeze?" and aching revelations, "she was ushered from one life / through the gate of another, / wreathed in the dubious and illusory / perfume of plucked orchids." *Year of the Snake* teems with serpents, fishes, fowls, and flowers: Roripaugh meticulously sketches flora and/or fauna in nearly every poem. Her animal bride poems are among her most evocative in this realm: "Snake Wife" conjures moments from sources as widely varied as Native American creation myths to the unfilled longings of the novels of Yasunari Kawabata. Roripaugh's stunning *Year of the Snake* slides into tender recesses between stones and hearts.

The wonder of Year of the Snake, by Lee Ann Roripaugh, is that it participates in the continuous becoming of the world. No image is content to rest on the page, but instead consistently drives to become distinctly other. Even the metamorphosis of a mayfly becomes mythic in its urge to "emerge sleeker/ shinier, brighter, without a mouth/ to eat with, exquisite and doomed,/ driven to swarm in a mating dance/ over water." Again and again in this collection, language thrusts forward to just such a moment of transformation. What these poems tell us, in a language both precise and passionate, is that we can meet change--even a "doomed" change--with something akin to dance. Year of the Snake is restless, Protean, magic.Don't miss Roripaugh's books.