Some Flawed Magic

In this beautiful new book, Some Flawed Magic, poet Patricia Caspers draws detailed portraits of relationships that span both time and place. Each poem brims with sensory detail, including a dying cow who "knelt prayer-like on front legs;" and a family sewing machine that "hides in its scratched cabinet like an ivory treasure." Against a backdrop of pastures, trees, rain-gullied snails, distant pickups, and the mildew scent of geraniums, Caspers crafts a world where, "All of my childhood/ was this: gorging on neglect, praying/ for my eyes to glow golden." By the end of the collection, the poet has studiously examined not only her own life, but the lives of her children. The book closes with infinite wisdom: "This is not grief,/ but its sister perhaps,/ the goodbye of growing up." Some Flawed Magic paints three generations of care, kindness, and intimacy with craftful strokes and colors.

-Patricia Colleen Murphy, Author of Bully Love

Patricia Casper's second collection seeks to reconcile grief with growing up. Some Flawed Magic is an equation, and Caspers solves for all the "theorems scratched...in childhood notebooks" as she maps familial stories both past and present. Caspers asks the tough questions that make us redefine who we are in relation to the people who made us and the people we shape in turn. Poets are the orators of truth and time, and Caspers asks, "Isn't the past always for sale?" Some Flawed Magi c is a record of ancestry that examines how "to break a family / to hold it together." These fervent narratives ground readers in a rich description of place where "pine-lined roads" reveal and "divulge secrets / from [their] depths." Some Flawed Magic is a wondrous coupling of memory with reality. Readers will be left tender and moved.

-John McCarthy, Scared Violent Like Horses